timelimit - Online in the Cloud

PROGRAM:

NAME

timelimit — effectively limit the absolute execution time of a process

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

The timelimit utility 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:

-p If the child process is terminated by a signal, timelimit propagates this condition,
i.e. sends the same signal to itself. This allows the program executing timelimit
to determine whether the child process was terminated by a signal or actually exited
with an exit code larger than 128.

-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.

On systems that support the setitimer(2) system call, the warntime and killtime values may
be specified in fractional seconds with microsecond precision.

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.

EXIT STATUS

If the child process exits normally, the timelimit utility will pass its exit code on up.
If the child process is terminated by a signal and the -p flag was not specified, the
timelimit utility's exit status is 128 plus the signal number, similar to sh(1). If the -p
flag was specified, the timelimit utility will raise the signal itself so that its own
parent process may in turn reliably distinguish between a signal and a larger than 128 exit
code.

In rare cases, the timelimit utility may encounter a system or user error; then, its exit
status is one of the standard sysexits(3) values:

EX_USAGE
The command-line parameters and options were incorrectly specified.

EX_SOFTWARE
The timelimit utility itself received an unexpected signal while waiting for the
child process to terminate.

EX_OSERR
The timelimit utility was unable to execute the child process, wait for it to
terminate, or examine its exit status.

EXAMPLES

The following examples are shown as given to the shell:

timelimit -p /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. If the rsync process is
terminated by a signal, timelimit will itself raise this signal.

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=4.99 WARNSIG=1 KILLTIME=1.000001 timelimit sh stats.sh

Start a shell script and kill it with a SIGHUP in a little under 5 seconds. If the shell
gets stuck and does not respond to the SIGHUP, kill it with the default SIGKILL just a bit
over a second afterwards.

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