On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 01:51:15PM +0100, you wrote:
It's nice to provide a workaround, and that's helpful to other people reading this bug. But I don't think that's really an answer to Matthew's request that timeout should have this as a built-in option.
Well, the more general answer is that I'm not going to introduce a debian-specific patch to change the behavior of timeout. coreutils upstream tends to see debian bug reports and can chime in on whether this is something that would be accepted there. Whether or not that happens, I offered a suggestion to address the immediate concern raised which can be ignored if desired.
I personally have an easier time coming up with use cases where I'd want the return code to initiate further logic than cases where just printing a message and doing nothing else is useful, but that's neither here nor there.
Mike Stone
