Re: Strange behavior with job control

[Christoph Dittmann]

On 07/27/2010 02:35 PM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 01:44:26PM +0200, Christoph Dittmann wrote:
>> What I was going for was a script which executes another command with a
>> timeout.
> 
> http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/068
The process I want to put under the timeout does not offer a timeout
setting by itself (see below).
The bash script http://www.shelldorado.com/scripts/cmds/timeout
lets the watchdog stay around long after the command has finished:
$ ./timeout -t 60 echo done; sleep 1; ps aux | grep '[s]leep'
done
1000    23115  0.0  0.0   9728   828 pts/1    S    15:00   0:00 sleep 60

timeout(1) looks like the way to go. The only thing I don't like is that
it is not installed on a standard debian or ubuntu system. That's why I
was hoping for a solution in bash.

> http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem

Oh, shame on me. :/

I can see how such a script looks like a really bad idea.

Just for the background: I run "darcs pull" in a cronjob every few hours
to mirror a darcs repository. If the darcs server happens to be offline
or not answering properly, it can happen that "darcs pull" hangs for
hours without doing anything. This happened only once so far and I
couldn't reproduce the circumstances. However, it broke the cronjob
because the hanging darcs process kept a lock in the local repository.
Just to avoid this I wanted to place a (relatively high) timeout on
"darcs pull" so that the repository is not locked indefinitely if
something goes wrong.

Christoph