Kill process after a given time bash?

Question

I have a script that tries to make a DB connection using another program and the timeout(2.5min) of the program is to long. I want to add this functionality to the script.

If it takes longer then 5 seconds to connect, kill the process
Else kill the sleep/kill process.

The issue I'm having is how bash reports when a process is killed, that's because the processes are in the same shell just the background. Is there a better way to do this or how can I silence the shell for the kill commands?

DB_CONNECTION_PROGRAM > $CONNECTFILE & pid=$!  (sleep 5; kill $pid) & sleep_pid=$! wait $pid  # If the DB failed to connect after 5 seconds and was killed status=$? #Kill returns 128+n (fatal error) if [ $status -gt 128 ]; then     no_connection="ERROR: Timeout while trying to connect to $dbserver" else # If it connected kill the sleep and any errors collect     kill $sleep_pid     no_connection=`sed -n '/^ERROR:/,$p' $CONNECTFILE` fi 

Answer 1

There's a GNU coreutils utility called timeout: http://www.gnu.org/s/coreutils/manual/html_node/timeout-invocation.html

If you have it on your platform, you could do:

timeout 5 CONNECT_TO_DB if [ $? -eq 124 ]; then     # Timeout occurred else     # No hang fi