Re: bash scripting..simple question

[Michael Salmon <Michael.Salmon@uab.ericsson.se>]

On Friday, September 13, 2002 12:16:11 PM +0300 urgrue <urgrue@tumsan.fi> 
wrote:
+------
| is there a way, in a bash script, to do something like:
| execute "this_command these_params"
| --if-its-not-done-in-600-seconds-then-kill-it-and-return-an-error-code
|
| situation is, i have a simple script that logs into remote boxes, and
| does some checks.
| it first pings each box to see if the route is up, if that fails it
| wont even try to log in.
| but sometimes, a box can be pinged but not logged into, for various
| reasons.
| in these cases, the ssh login attempt seems to just sit there and
| doesnt timeout, and the whole script hangs, waiting until ssh exits.
| which i have observed to take at times HOURS, at times it _never_ exits.
|
| any suggestions?
+-----X8

It is a little tricky, you need to start the first command in the 
background and then sleep and kill that job if it is still running. Here is 
an example from a Bourbe shell script:

    rsh -n $gw test -x $cmd \&\& $cmd ${1+"$@"} > $tmp &
    pid=$!
    # timeout function
    (
        sleep 45
        if kill -0 $pid > /dev/null 2>&1
        then
            kill -TERM $pid
        fi
    ) &
    wait $pid

/Michael
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