[plug] Killing process after time

[Bernard Blackham]

On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 03:42:13PM +0800, Tim White wrote:
> I have a perl script that takes in some numbers does some user interaction 
> and then needs to run a process that is killed after a certain amount of 
> time.

There's the timeout command (apt-get install timeout).

Or in perl you'd do something like (untested code) :

my $child_pid = fork();
if ($child_pid eq 0) {
	exec("/bin/sleep", "10");
	/* shouldn't be reached */
	exit;
}
$SIG{ALRM} = sub { kill(9, $child_pid) };
alarm(1);
wait();

There's more than likely some dangerous race condition in the above,
but the idea is there :)

HTH,

Bernard.