TIMELIMIT(8)

NAME
timelimit - effectively limit the absolute execution time of a process

SYNOPSIS
timelimit [-q] [-S killsig] [-s warnsig] [-T killtime] [-t warntime] command [arguments ...]

DESCRIPTION
timelimit executes a given command with the supplied arguments and terminates the spawned process after a given time with a given signal. If the process exits before the time limit has elapsed, timelimit will silently exit, too.

Options:

-q  Quiet operation - timelimit does not output diagnostic messages about signals sent to the child process.

-S killsig
    Specify the number of the signal to be sent to the process killtime seconds after warntime has expired. Defaults to 9 (SIGKILL).

-s warnsig
    Specify the number of the signal to be sent to the process warntime seconds after it has been started. Defaults to 15 (SIGTERM).

-T killtime
    Specify the maximum execution time of the process before sending killsig after warnsig has been sent. Defaults to 120 seconds.

-t warntime
    Specify the maximum execution time of the process in seconds before sending warnsig. Defaults to 3600 seconds.

ENVIRONMENT

KILLSIG
    The killsig to use if the -S option was not specified.

KILLTIME
    The killtime to use if the -T option was not specified.

WARNSIG
    The warnsig to use if the -s option was not specified.

WARNTIME
    The warntime to use if the -t option was not specified.

EXAMPLES

The following examples are shown as given to the shell:

    timelimit /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.

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

Start a tcpserver(n) 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.

    env WARNTIME=600 WARNSIG=1 KILLTIME=30 timelimit sh stats.sh

Start a shell script and kill it with a SIGHUP in 600 seconds. If the shell gets stuck and does not respond to the SIGHUP, kill it with the default SIGKILL after 30 more seconds.

SEE ALSO
kill(1), rsync(1), signal(3), tcpserver(n)

STANDARDS
No standards documentation was harmed in the process of creating timelimit.

BUGS
Please report any bugs in timelimit to the author.

AUTHOR
timelimit was conceived and written by Peter Pentchev <roam@orbitel.bg> with contributions by Karsten W Rohrbach <karsten@rohrbach.de>.