Vincent Lefevre wrote:
Not every system has bash. If this is for compatibility, you can learn POSIX sh, but e.g. Solaris /bin/sh is not a POSIX sh. For this reason and because POSIX sh is limited (you can't execute a command and have a timeout on it),
Here is a method for doing a timeout. I'm not arguing against
the claim that sh is limited, nor am I claiming that the method
presented here is robust (it doesn't work well if the function
has already completed, for example), but this certainly demonstrates
that it is possible to execute a command with a timeout.
#!/bin/sh
# A function which never completes.
foo() {
echo "Never returns! $$"
while true; do
sleep 1;
done
}
# Execute the commands with the specified timeout.
timeout() {
local timeout=$1
shift
local cmd=$@
echo $cmd
$cmd &
sleep $timeout
kill %%
}
# Execute foo, but terminate it after 1 second.
timeout 1 foo