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timeout

timeout runs a given command with a timeout. If the command takes longer than the specified number of seconds, it is killed and timeout exits with status 255.

Using timeout has some advantages over coding timeouts with shell tools:

• No runaway sleep processes on the system,
• no dependency on particular shell features,
• clearly defined behaviour in case of abnormal termination of the child process.

See the man page for details.

Portability

timeout should compile and run on most Unix-like platforms. It has been successfully tested on:

• GNU/Linux (i386, x86_64, PPC, alpha, arm, mips32)
• IRIX
• Mac OS X

Download

timeout is free software distributed under the GPL.

timeout-0.0.1.tar.gz (source)

See the files README and INSTALL in the tarball for more information.

Examples

timeout 60 ./test_run