kill a process in a certain amount of time

[COKEDUDE]

I would like to kill a process in a certain amount of time. Can I please get some ideas on how to do this?

[jpollard]

Which time? CPU utilization, elapsed, or wait time?

usually the last is a failure of the application to account for I/O delays and attempting to use asynchronous I/O improperly (not my area of expertise though).

Need more information - what are you trying to do?

[jsp]

you can schedule stuff with at, like

$at now + 5 minutes
at>killall myprocess
at> CTRL-D
job 77 at Fri May 11 08:22:00 2012

[COKEDUDE]

Originally Posted by jpollard

Which time? CPU utilization, elapsed, or wait time?

usually the last is a failure of the application to account for I/O delays and attempting to use asynchronous I/O improperly (not my area of expertise though).

Need more information - what are you trying to do?

Sometimes I want it to be 10 minutes, sometimes I want it to be 20 minutes, etc. I would like a method that is easy to change with different amounts of time.

[dd_wizard]

Try this:

CommandYouWantToRun & sleep 10m; kill %+

This starts CommandYouWantToRun in background, then sleeps 10 minutes, then kills the "current job".

dd_wizard

[jpollard]

Welll... one way is to do something like:

$ coproc sleep 100
$ sleep 20
$ kill -9 $COPROC_PID

The "sleep 100" is the command to be timed. The "sleep 20" is the time to wait for it before aborting it.

The "kill -9 $COPROC_PID" aborts the coprocess pid (which is the "sleep 100" line).

If the timed command terminates before the kill command then the kill will get "no such process" error.

You can lookup the coproc and is assocated PID handling in the manpage on bash.