timeout
Run a program with a timeout
Usage
timeout [-q] [-s signal] timeout program [argument ...]
Starts program. If it does not terminate within the given timeout, the
program is killed with signal (SIGHUP by default) and a message is
printed to standard error. The message can be surpressed with -q.
The timeout can be a bare number of seconds, or suffixed with 's' for seconds, 'm' for minutes, or 'h' for hours. The signal, if given, must be numeric.
Exit status
Passes through the exit status of program.
Exits 64 (EX_USAGE) on missing or invalid argument, 127 if program
cannot be started, or 1 on any other error.
Example
Run a configure script with a 10 minute timeout:
$ timeout 10m ./configure
...
timeout: ./configure exceeded 10m
Installation
Should work on any modern Unix, including macOS and Linux:
make
[sudo] make install
[sudo] make uninstall
Author
Sijmen J. Mulder (ik@sjmulder.nl)