How to time out a Matlab command?

Is there a way to time out a Matlab command within a mfile, so that mfile execution resumes after a certain time spent on the Matlab command?

Background: Each day I automatically run a mfile which includes ftp of remote files. My company's FTP server sometimes has problems: the ftp command will connect but hang indefinitely yet no errors are returned, so I can't use try/catch. If our office manager restarts the FTP server manually (I don't have access) it fixes the ftp problem, but until then I want the mfile to complete since it does other useful things besides FTP. Ideally the mfile would kill the ftp command if more than 5 minutes have elapsed, then run the rest of the mfile.

Any ideas how to do this? I want the mfile to work on different machines so prefer to avoid solutions based on installing new software, like new FTP clients.

[jgg]

I think, in general, this is probably not possible or easy, since you'd need multiple processing threads to track another running process, which sounds nasty.

However, it might be possible if there's some detail on how exactly are you are calling the command. For example, if it's infinitely looping a call or something, you could set up a persistent timer and then throw an error when the timer expires.

But this depends on your specific situation; there's no general way to do this.