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

Question

I have a bash script that launches a child process that crashes (actually, hangs) from time to time and with no apparent reason (closed source, so there isn\'t much I can do

Answer 1

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.)

Answer 2

Here's the third answer I've submitted here. This one handles signal interrupts and cleans up background processes when SIGINT is received. It uses the $BASHPID and exec trick used in the top answer to get the PID of a process (in this case $$ in a sh invocation). It uses a FIFO to communicate with a subshell that is responsible for killing and cleanup. (This is like the pipe in my second answer, but having a named pipe means that the signal handler can write into it too.)

run_with_timeout ()
{
  t=$1 ; shift

  trap cleanup 2

  F=$$.fifo ; rm -f $F ; mkfifo $F

  # first, run main process in background
  "$@" & pid=$!

  # sleeper process to time out
  ( sh -c "echo \$\$ >$F ; exec sleep $t" ; echo timeout >$F ) &
  read sleeper <$F

  # control shell. read from fifo.
  # final input is "finished".  after that
  # we clean up.  we can get a timeout or a
  # signal first.
  ( exec 0<$F
    while : ; do
      read input
      case $input in
        finished)
          test $sleeper != 0 && kill $sleeper
          rm -f $F
          exit 0
          ;;
        timeout)
          test $pid != 0 && kill $pid
          sleeper=0
          ;;
        signal)
          test $pid != 0 && kill $pid
          ;;
      esac
    done
  ) &

  # wait for process to end
  wait $pid
  status=$?
  echo finished >$F
  return $status
}

cleanup ()
{
  echo signal >$$.fifo
}

I've tried to avoid race conditions as far as I can. However, one source of error I couldn't remove is when the process ends near the same time as the timeout. For example, run_with_timeout 2 sleep 2 or run_with_timeout 0 sleep 0. For me, the latter gives an error:

timeout.sh: line 250: kill: (23248) - No such process

as it is trying to kill a process that has already exited by itself.