How to exit from a command after n seconds?

Question

I'm writing a script and would like to know how to ask one of the commands to exit after few seconds. For eg. let's suppose my script runs 2 application commands in it.

#!/bin/bash

for i in `cat servers`
do
<command 1> $i >> Output_file  #Consistency command
<command 2> $i >> Output_file  #Communication check
done

These commands are to check consistency & communication to/from application. I want to know how do I make sure that command 1 & 2 runs for only few seconds and if there is no response from particular host, move on to next command.

You seem to be looking for this: [Timeout a command in bash without unnecessary delay](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687948/timeout-a-command-in-bash-without-unnecessary-delay) — devnull, May 23 '13 at 11:34
I had a look @ that, isn't there an easier way?? I don't want to make my tiny script too complex! :) — Marcos, May 23 '13 at 19:07
this is useful for imagemagick's `display` command which doesn't play nicely with xargs. — Sridhar Sarnobat, Feb 13 '17 at 01:38

Chris · Answer 1 · 2013-05-23T11:51:03.660

17

~~bash~~ coreutils has got 'timeout` command.

From manual:

DESCRIPTION

Start COMMAND, and kill it if still running after NUMBER seconds. SUFFIX may be "s" for seconds (the default), "m" for minutes, "h" for hours or "d" for days.

for example:

timeout 5 sleep 6

edited May 23 '13 at 11:51

answered May 23 '13 at 10:55

Chris

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I'm trying for rpcinfo on solaris... "timeout 5 rpcinfo -p server_name" it gives "command not found" , but there is man page entry for it. – Marcos May 23 '13 at 11:20
1

`timeout` isn't a bash built-in. It's provided by GNU coreutils. – devnull May 23 '13 at 11:36
So how do I use it ?? – Marcos May 23 '13 at 19:02
@Marcos not sure what you mean? See if you can install `coreutils`. If you can, then you should get `timeout` command. – Chris May 23 '13 at 19:44

How to exit from a command after n seconds?

1 Answers1