Kill or terminate subprocess when timeout?

Question

I would like to repeatedly execute a subprocess as fast as possible. However, sometimes the process will take too long, so I want to kill it. I use signal.signal(...) like

Answer 1

Here is something I wrote as a watchdog for subprocess execution. I use it now a lot, but I'm not so experienced so maybe there are some flaws in it:

import subprocess
import time

def subprocess_execute(command, time_out=60):
    """executing the command with a watchdog"""

    # launching the command
    c = subprocess.Popen(command)

    # now waiting for the command to complete
    t = 0
    while t < time_out and c.poll() is None:
        time.sleep(1)  # (comment 1)
        t += 1

    # there are two possibilities for the while to have stopped:
    if c.poll() is None:
        # in the case the process did not complete, we kill it
        c.terminate()
        # and fill the return code with some error value
        returncode = -1  # (comment 2)

    else:                 
        # in the case the process completed normally
        returncode = c.poll()

    return returncode   

Usage:

 return = subprocess_execute(['java', '-jar', 'some.jar'])

Comments:

1. here, the watchdog time out is in seconds; but it's easy to change to whatever needed by changing the time.sleep() value. The time_out will have to be documented accordingly;
2. according to what is needed, here it maybe more suitable to raise some exception.

Documentation: I struggled a bit with the documentation of subprocess module to understand that subprocess.Popen is not blocking; the process is executed in parallel (maybe I do not use the correct word here, but I think it's understandable).

But as what I wrote is linear in its execution, I really have to wait for the command to complete, with a time out to avoid bugs in the command to pause the nightly execution of the script.