Run a process and kill it if it doesn't end within one hour

Question

I need to do the following in Python. I want to spawn a process (subprocess module?), and:

• if the process ends normally, to continue exactly from the moment it

Answer 1

There are at least 2 ways to do this by using psutil as long as you know the process PID. Assuming the process is created as such:

import subprocess
subp = subprocess.Popen(['progname'])

...you can get its creation time in a busy loop like this:

import psutil, time

TIMEOUT = 60 * 60  # 1 hour

p = psutil.Process(subp.pid)
while 1:
    if (time.time() - p.create_time()) > TIMEOUT:
        p.kill()
        raise RuntimeError('timeout')
    time.sleep(5)

...or simply, you can do this:

import psutil

p = psutil.Process(subp.pid)
try:
    p.wait(timeout=60*60)
except psutil.TimeoutExpired:
    p.kill()
    raise

Also, while you're at it, you might be interested in the following extra APIs:

>>> p.status()
'running'
>>> p.is_running()
True
>>>