Yea, I'd say you're pretty limited to:
------------------------------------
dosomething &
pid=$!
sleep $x
kill $pid
------------------------------------
You could put a small amount of logic to check it every once in a while
as well.
Maybe
------------------------------------
dosomething &
pid=$!
while [ $miutes < $timeout ]; do
sleep 60
let minutes=minutes+1
stillrunning=`ps -ef |grep $pid` # wont work if new proc is started and
gets same pid
if [ ! -z $still ]; then
break;
fi
done
-------------------------------------
*disclaimer i didn't test or even try to run any of this.
On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 12:51 -0700, Erik Bixby wrote:
> So, I'm guessing there's no elegant way of doing what I want,
> something similar to "time" that calls a command and acts upon it,
> somehow...
> -Erik
>
> On 10/26/05, vodhner@cox.net <vodhner@cox.net> wrote:
> Erik wrote:
> > I was wondering if anyone knew a way to allow a shell
> > command to run for a specific period of time. In this
> > particular case, I want tcpdump to run for 23 hours,
> > 59 minutes, 59 seconds.
>
> It would be best if the process could limit itself, since
> anything you do in a shell script will have sloppy timing,
> maybe a few seconds off. But you can do this for any process,
> using the following crude approach within a single script:
>
> This script should be run with all its output redirected to a
> log file, so you can have a record of how it went.
>
> Run your process (tcpdump) in the background with &
>
> This becomes an independent process, so the next command in
> your script will start immediately:
>
> date # output goes into your log file.
>
> sleep 86399 # Or less, since kill won't be instantaneous
>
> date
>
> Use a pipeline with "ps -ef" and "grep" to identify the
> running tcpdump process. Extract the pid using "cut" and do a
> "kill".
>
> sleep 2 # just to give kill time to take effect
>
> ps -ef | grep ... # Did it go away?
>
> date
>
> exit
>
> Details on request, but the above commands are good things to
> learn. This type of ps + grep pipeline is also useful to
> detect if a duplicate copy of a script is running, etc.
>
> The sleep command is only precise to within a second or two,
> and other system activity might delay the next command.
>
> Vic
>
>
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--
Bill Warner <
wwarner42@cox.net>
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