timelimit - limit a process's absolute execution time

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Overview

The timelimit tool executes a command and terminates the spawned process after a given time with a given signal. A "warning" signal is sent first, then, after a timeout, a "kill" signal, similar to the way init(8) operates on shutdown.

Examples

The following examples are shown as given to the shell:

sh timelimit -p /usr/local/bin/rsync rsync://some.host/dir /opt/mirror

Run the rsync program to mirror a WWW or FTP site and kill it if it runs longer than 1 hour (that is 3600 seconds) with SIGTERM. If the rsync process does not exit after receiving the SIGTERM, timelimit issues a SIGKILL 120 seconds after the SIGTERM. If the rsync process is terminated by a signal, timelimit will itself raise this signal.

sh tcpserver 0 8888 timelimit -t600 -T300 /opt/services/chat/stats

Start a tcpserver process listening on tcp port 8888; each client connection shall invoke an instance of an IRC statistics tool under /opt/services/chat and kill it after 600 seconds have elapsed. If the stats process is still running after the SIGTERM, it will be killed by a SIGKILL sent 300 seconds later.

sh env WARNTIME=4.99 WARNSIG=1 KILLTIME=1.000001 timelimit sh stats.sh

Start a shell script and kill it with a SIGHUP in a little under 5 seconds. If the shell gets stuck and does not respond to the SIGHUP, kill it with the default SIGKILL just a bit over a second afterwards.

Contact

The timelimit utility was written by Peter Pentchev. It is developed in a GitLab repository. This documentation is hosted at Ringlet with a copy at ReadTheDocs.