Command line command to auto-kill a command after a certain amount of time

Question

GNU Coreutils includes the timeout command, installed by default on many systems.

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/timeout-invocation.html

To watch free -m for one minute, then kill it by sending a TERM signal:

timeout 1m watch free -m

Maybe I'm not understanding the question, but this sounds doable directly, at least in bash:

( /path/to/slow command with options ) & sleep 5 ; kill $!

This runs the first command, inside the parenthesis, for five seconds, and then kills it. The entire operation runs synchronously, i.e. you won't be able to use your shell while it is busy waiting for the slow command. If that is not what you wanted, it should be possible to add another &.

The $! variable is a Bash builtin that contains the process ID of the most recently started subshell. It is important to not have the & inside the parenthesis, doing it that way loses the process ID.

I've arrived rather late to this party, but I don't see my favorite trick listed in the answers.

Under *NIX, an alarm(2) is inherited across an execve(2) and SIGALRM is fatal by default. So, you can often simply:

$ doalarm () { perl -e 'alarm shift; exec @ARGV' "$@"; } # define a helper function

$ doalarm 300 ./foo.sh args

or install a trivial C wrapper to do that for you.

Advantages Only one PID is involved, and the mechanism is simple. You won't kill the wrong process if, for example, ./foo.sh exited "too quickly" and its PID was re-used. You don't need several shell subprocesses working in concert, which can be done correctly but is rather race-prone.

Disadvantages The time-constrained process cannot manipulate its alarm clock (e.g., alarm(2), ualarm(2), setitimer(2)), since this would likely clear the inherited alarm. Obviously, neither can it block or ignore SIGALRM, though the same can be said of SIGINT, SIGTERM, etc. for some other approaches.

Some (very old, I think) systems implement sleep(2) in terms of alarm(2), and, even today, some programmers use alarm(2) as a crude internal timeout mechanism for I/O and other operations. In my experience, however, this technique is applicable to the vast majority of processes you want to time limit.

There is also ulimit, which can be used to limit the execution time available to sub-processes.

ulimit -t 10

Limits the process to 10 seconds of CPU time.

To actually use it to limit a new process, rather than the current process, you may wish to use a wrapper script:

#! /usr/bin/env python

import os
os.system("ulimit -t 10; other-command-here")

other-command can be any tool. I was running a Java, Python, C and Scheme versions of different sorting algorithms, and logging how long they took, whilst limiting execution time to 30 seconds. A Cocoa-Python application generated the various command lines - including the arguments - and collated the times into a CSV file, but it was really just fluff on top of the command provided above.

I have a program called timeout that does that - written in C, originally in 1989 but updated periodically since then.

---

Update: this code fails to compile on MacOS X because SIGRTMIN is not defined, and fails to timeout when run on MacOS X because the `signal()` function there resumes the `wait()` after the alarm times out - which is not the required behaviour. I have a new version of `timeout.c` which deals with both these problems (using `sigaction()` instead of `signal()`). As before, contact me for a 10K gzipped tar file with the source code and a manual page (see my profile).

---

/*
@(#)File:           $RCSfile: timeout.c,v $
@(#)Version:        $Revision: 4.6 $
@(#)Last changed:   $Date: 2007/03/01 22:23:02 $
@(#)Purpose:        Run command with timeout monitor
@(#)Author:         J Leffler
@(#)Copyright:      (C) JLSS 1989,1997,2003,2005-07
*/

#define _POSIX_SOURCE       /* Enable kill() in <unistd.h> on Solaris 7 */
#define _XOPEN_SOURCE 500

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include "stderr.h"

#define CHILD       0
#define FORKFAIL    -1

static const char usestr[] = "[-vV] -t time [-s signal] cmd [arg ...]";

#ifndef lint
/* Prevent over-aggressive optimizers from eliminating ID string */
const char jlss_id_timeout_c[] = "@(#)$Id: timeout.c,v 4.6 2007/03/01 22:23:02 jleffler Exp $";
#endif /* lint */

static void catcher(int signum)
{
    return;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    pid_t   pid;
    int     tm_out;
    int     kill_signal;
    pid_t   corpse;
    int     status;
    int     opt;
    int     vflag = 0;

    err_setarg0(argv[0]);

    opterr = 0;
    tm_out = 0;
    kill_signal = SIGTERM;
    while ((opt = getopt(argc, argv, "vVt:s:")) != -1)
    {
        switch(opt)
        {
        case 'V':
            err_version("TIMEOUT", &"@(#)$Revision: 4.6 $ ($Date: 2007/03/01 22:23:02 $)"[4]);
            break;
        case 's':
            kill_signal = atoi(optarg);
            if (kill_signal <= 0 || kill_signal >= SIGRTMIN)
                err_error("signal number must be between 1 and %d\n", SIGRTMIN - 1);
            break;
        case 't':
            tm_out = atoi(optarg);
            if (tm_out <= 0)
                err_error("time must be greater than zero (%s)\n", optarg);
            break;
        case 'v':
            vflag = 1;
            break;
        default:
            err_usage(usestr);
            break;
        }
    }

    if (optind >= argc || tm_out == 0)
        err_usage(usestr);

    if ((pid = fork()) == FORKFAIL)
        err_syserr("failed to fork\n");
    else if (pid == CHILD)
    {
        execvp(argv[optind], &argv[optind]);
        err_syserr("failed to exec command %s\n", argv[optind]);
    }

    /* Must be parent -- wait for child to die */
    if (vflag)
        err_remark("time %d, signal %d, child PID %u\n", tm_out, kill_signal, (unsigned)pid);
    signal(SIGALRM, catcher);
    alarm((unsigned int)tm_out);
    while ((corpse = wait(&status)) != pid && errno != ECHILD)
    {
        if (errno == EINTR)
        {
            /* Timed out -- kill child */
            if (vflag)
                err_remark("timed out - send signal %d to process %d\n", (int)kill_signal, (int)pid);
            if (kill(pid, kill_signal) != 0)
                err_syserr("sending signal %d to PID %d - ", kill_signal, pid);
            corpse = wait(&status);
            break;
        }
    }

    alarm(0);
    if (vflag)
    {
        if (corpse == (pid_t) -1)
            err_syserr("no valid PID from waiting - ");
        else
            err_remark("child PID %u status 0x%04X\n", (unsigned)corpse, (unsigned)status);
    }

    if (corpse != pid)
        status = 2; /* I don't know what happened! */
    else if (WIFEXITED(status))
        status = WEXITSTATUS(status);
    else if (WIFSIGNALED(status))
        status = WTERMSIG(status);
    else
        status = 2; /* I don't know what happened! */

    return(status);
}

If you want the 'official' code for 'stderr.h' and 'stderr.c', contact me (see my profile).