Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I would like to invoke a shell script with period (in seconds) as a parameter and want it to run olny for that period. The script should come out after that period even some work is going inside the script.

Regards

I don't know if any shell has a built-in facility to timeout a command but in perl, for example, "alarm x" will interrupt the process after x seconds by sending a SIGALRM signal.

---------- Post updated at 10:59 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:40 PM ----------

To do this with the shell, or some scripting language that does not have an alarm function, you will need to code your program so that it starts another background process (which you will pass your pid and the timeout value). It should sleep for the required period and then, when it wakes up from sleep, it should kill the parent program.

I remember that this question had been answered already.
Did you try searching for it?

Here is a start,

Code:

start the process in background
get the pid using $!
sleep for 'duration' && kill -2 <using_the_above_pid>