The right thing to do is to have the program which is reading the message file
do a timed read.

The Apache TimeOut directive might also work, but if you set it too low you
might impact browsers with slow network connections:

        http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/core.html#timeout

- Mark B.

"Born, Ken" wrote:
>
> Greetings,
> I have a cgi program that is launched from an HTML document.  The CGI
> program will open up 2 message files.  It will write to a message file and
> wait and listen on the other message file for the response.  However, if it
> never receives a response back, it will just wait and wait.  How do I
> shutdown the cgi program that is running under the UNIX shell? so that it
> will close the message files.  Should I put something in my code like a
> timeout routine?
>
> Thanks....