Is it possible to bypass max time limit?

I've got a live script which occasional has to retrieve a file via ftp, download to the server, post-process it then display it. I use caching to check to see if I've already got the file, but if I don't I have to process the ftp_get operation which occasionally times out. So, is it possible to trap the time limit exceeded error and return a fail code? For example: function GetFileViaFTP( $filename ) { if (file_exists("cache/" . $filename)) { return true; } $ftp = ftp_connect("some host"); ftp_login($ftp, "some username", "some password"); ftp_chdir($ftp, "some path"); if (ftp_get($ftp, "cache/" . $filename, $filename, FTP_BINARY)) // This will sometimes fail { ftp_quit($ftp); return true; } ftp_quit($ftp); return false; } function GetFile( $filename ) { if (file_exists("cache/" . $filename) || GetFileViaFTP($cache)) { return file("cache/" . $filename); } return "Sorry, the file {$filename} could not be located"; }