search for: evalwithtimeout

Dear R-helpers, I've just started playing with getGraphicsEvent() in R, and was wondering if there is a simple way to stop this function waiting for input after a pre-defined time, instead of relying either on a non-NULL value from one of the event handlers or for a user-interrupt for it to halt (as per the R manual). The only way that I've thought of to make this work is using

What are the ramifications of setting up user signal handling to allow the use of e.g. alarm(2) to send a SIGALRM to the R process at some number of seconds in the future to e.g. interrupt a routine that is taking too long to complete. I can't find any R language support for this (e.g. a timeout argument to tryCatch() would be ideal), so am wondering what kinds of problems are to be expected