How to kill a child process after a given timeout in Bash?

Question

(As seen in: BASH FAQ entry #68: "How do I run a command, and have it abort (timeout) after N seconds?")

If you don't mind downloading something, use timeout (sudo apt-get install timeout) and use it like: (most Systems have it already installed otherwise use sudo apt-get install coreutils)

timeout 10 ping www.goooooogle.com

If you don't want to download something, do what timeout does internally:

( cmdpid=$BASHPID; (sleep 10; kill $cmdpid) & exec ping www.goooooogle.com )

In case that you want to do a timeout for longer bash code, use the second option as such:

( cmdpid=$BASHPID; 
    (sleep 10; kill $cmdpid) \
   & while ! ping -w 1 www.goooooogle.com 
     do 
         echo crap; 
     done )

# Spawn a child process:
(dosmth) & pid=$!
# in the background, sleep for 10 secs then kill that process
(sleep 10 && kill -9 $pid) &

or to get the exit codes as well:

# Spawn a child process:
(dosmth) & pid=$!
# in the background, sleep for 10 secs then kill that process
(sleep 10 && kill -9 $pid) & waiter=$!
# wait on our worker process and return the exitcode
exitcode=$(wait $pid && echo $?)
# kill the waiter subshell, if it still runs
kill -9 $waiter 2>/dev/null
# 0 if we killed the waiter, cause that means the process finished before the waiter
finished_gracefully=$?

sleep 999&
t=$!
sleep 10
kill $t

I also had this question and found two more things very useful:

1. The SECONDS variable in bash.
2. The command "pgrep".

So I use something like this on the command line (OSX 10.9):

ping www.goooooogle.com & PING_PID=$(pgrep 'ping'); SECONDS=0; while pgrep -q 'ping'; do sleep 0.2; if [ $SECONDS = 10 ]; then kill $PING_PID; fi; done

As this is a loop I included a "sleep 0.2" to keep the CPU cool. ;-)

(BTW: ping is a bad example anyway, you just would use the built-in "-t" (timeout) option.)