Timeout on a script

[Ravi S. Banda]

I have a UNIX script that is run to stop tuxedo processes gracefully. But, not all the time it completes normal. Sometimes, the script just hangs! So, I open another session, run a kill script that kills all the remaining tuxedo processes and also kill the shared memory identifiers.

Question: How would I put a timeout on the script, so if the 'stop' script has run for 5-10 minutes, I want the control back? I can take appropriate action.

Thanks!
Ravi.

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

You could do the action in the background and then sleep for 10 minutes and then see if that background process is still there.

[Ravi S. Banda]

good point!
totally overlooked.
assigning points.

Thanks!
Ravi.

[Viktor Balogh]

i would check in the process list what is going on and why it hangs. just grep in the output of 'ps -ef' and traverse through the parent-child processes to see what is it doing now, for what child process it is waiting. if you could identify the child process, do a 'tusc -p PID_of_child' to see what is going on deep down... ;)

handing the control back would be just a workaround, i would prefer clear it what is the hard part by stopping the processes.

[Hakki Aydin Ucar]

As far as I know Unix Shell do not have in built facility for timeout a command. You have to use C OR Perl programming. For example check following, you can see C has a function;

# man timeout

So you need a trick as a sleep command and kill process you want ,like this clause:

SetTimer() {
DEF_TOUT=${1:-10};
if [ $DEF_TOUT -ne 0 ] ; then
sleep $DEF_TOUT && kill -s 14 $$ &
CHPROCIDS="$CHPROCIDS $!"
TIMERPROC=$!
fi
}

after 10 sec. it will issue a sleep command with a timeout and use the kill command to send the shell's process ID (stored in $$)