Shell Programming and Scripting

#!/usr/bin/env python
import datetime
import subprocess
import sys
import os
import signal
from time import sleep
def runForAWhile(cmd, secs=10):
 print("running %s" % cmd)
 timeout = datetime.timedelta(seconds=secs)
 print timeout
 proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True)
 status = proc.poll()
 start = datetime.datetime.now()
 while (status is None and (datetime.datetime.now() - start) <
timeout): #not timed out
     #print proc.stdout.readline() #TODO timestamp?
 print status
     #print datetime.datetime.now() - start
 if 0 == status:
     print("'%s' is program exited" %cmd)
 else:
     try:
         os.kill(proc.pid, signal.SIGINT)
     print "Process timeout: '%s'" % cmd
     except OSError:
         pass
cmd="ping 128.224.165.20 -c 4"
runForAWhile(cmd,30)