Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I am having a script, which run fine. But what I want to do is that the script should run for specified time and terminate then ( say for a minute).

Can somebody help me for this. I would be greatful.


Thanks,
Aru

If i understand your requirements correctly, you can start the script in background and then sleep for a minute, then stop it.

I guess you could put this in the start of your script...

Code:

echo "kill $$" | at now + 1 min

...but I can't really recommend it. You should consider rewriting your script. Presumably your script is using a loop to do something, so perhaps you could try something like this....

Code:

End=$((SECONDS+60))
while [[ $SECONDS -lt $End ]]
do
  : do something
done

Hi,

Thanks for answering. Please confirm me that whatever I am writing below is what you asked me to do. In my script I want "top" to terminate after 1 min. As I am considerabely new to Unix. I have just written, what I am writing below in file x.sh.

Now when I run x.sh ....... it does not terminate after 1 minute. Please help me in modifying the below script.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

End=$((SECONDS+60))
while [[ $SECONDS -lt $End ]]
do

top >> top.out
done

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<



Thanks,
Aru

if the checking is to be done inside the script itself,

as of,

the n seconds will not be guaranteed for the script to execute
where m seconds ( m < n ) would be taken for checking and other calculations,

rather,

have a wrapper script,
pid=call the process to be executed through the wrapper
do the checking (for certain amt of time in the wrapper script )
done
then pass the kill signal to process kill <val> <pid>

You never said that this was for the top command. Take a look at the manual pages for your version of top. You will be able to specify a delay and the number of iterations to run, e.g....

Code:

top -b -d 5 -n 12

well in the above while loop i didnt see the SECONDS initiliased to 0, assuming it may not be required, there is no increment of the SECONDS in the while loop, so your while loop will surely not terminate
so in the while loop you may want to add a line
(( SECONDS = $SECONDS + 1 ))

i hope SECONDS is just a variable and no special shell built-in. Hence it has to be treated just like any other variable.
besides, you want SECONDS to really act as a SECOND, so in the while loop, put a sleep 1