BASH timeout command as xargs command

Question

This is my first post here. I am a hobbyist.

I am on an RPi4 running "Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)".

A pipeline gets the power status of a bunch of hard drives. However, on some drives hdparm becomes unresponsive.

To try to solve this I used the timeout command followed by hdparm as argument to an xargs in a pipeline, but the timeout now times-out xargs rather than hdparm.

The pipeline works fine until the last section that is the xargs command:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ | grep -f /home/dec/drivelist| cut -d '/' -f 3 | xargs -I {} timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/{}

_{( drivelist Is an ASCII file that just has a single disk UUID on each line. )}

This outputs the following and times-out at sda2 where it exits and fails to continue xargs.

/dev/sdf1:
 drive state is:  standby

/dev/sdd1:
 drive state is:  standby

/dev/sdg1:
 drive state is:  standby

/dev/sda2:
xargs: timeout: terminated by sig

The problem here is that the timeout actually times out xargs (or the entire pipe?) rather than just hdparm.

I have tried:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ | grep -f /home/dec/drivelist| cut -d '/' -f 3 | xargs -I {} bash -C "timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/{}"

which does not work as desired either and outputs:

bash: timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/sdf1: No such file or directory
bash: timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/sdd1: No such file or directory
bash: timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/sdg1: No such file or directory
bash: timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/sda2: No such file or directory

How do I make this work in a pipeline, avoiding multiline code?

Thanks for your time and help.

vLAd

ADDITIONAL QUESTION RE. HDPARM

hdparm -C seems to hang checking, for example, a 2.7 TB volume. This volume is connected to the RPi via SATA-USB and plugged into a USB3 port.

Could hdparm -C on such a size perhaps need several minutes to complete and am I just impatient?

EDIT

I have added this to the pipeline, just before the xargs, but to no avail; this drops the number, so sdXn becomes just sdX.

grep -Eo "[a-z]{3}"

Answer 1

Instead of
bash -C "timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/{}"
did you mean
bash -c "timeout -k 10 8 hdparm -C /dev/{}"
?

The upper- and lower-case "[Cc]" arguments to bash mean very different things...