On 07/27/2010 02:05 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > On 07/27/2010 05:44 AM, Christoph Dittmann wrote: >> What I was going for was a script which executes another command with a >> timeout. > > If you can assume the presence of GNU coreutils, use timeout(1). Much > nicer for this particular task.
Thanks, I'll look into this. OK, it looks like timeout(1) is in coreutils starting with version 7.5-1, and unfortunately Ubuntu 10.04 only offers coreutils-7.4-2 with timeout in a separate package. According to the manpage, timeout does precisely what I need. I'll definitely remember that program, thanks. It's probably a cleaner way than implementing a bash script to do the same task manually. Christoph
