How to kill a child process after a given timeout in Bash?

Question

I have a bash script that launches a child process that crashes (actually, hangs) from time to time and with no apparent reason (closed source, so there isn\'t much I can do

Answer 1

One way is to run the program in a subshell, and communicate with the subshell through a named pipe with the read command. This way you can check the exit status of the process being run and communicate this back through the pipe.

Here's an example of timing out the yes command after 3 seconds. It gets the PID of the process using pgrep (possibly only works on Linux). There is also some problem with using a pipe in that a process opening a pipe for read will hang until it is also opened for write, and vice versa. So to prevent the read command hanging, I've "wedged" open the pipe for read with a background subshell. (Another way to prevent a freeze to open the pipe read-write, i.e. read -t 5 <>finished.pipe - however, that also may not work except with Linux.)

rm -f finished.pipe
mkfifo finished.pipe

{ yes >/dev/null; echo finished >finished.pipe ; } &
SUBSHELL=$!

# Get command PID
while : ; do
    PID=$( pgrep -P $SUBSHELL yes )
    test "$PID" = "" || break
    sleep 1
done

# Open pipe for writing
{ exec 4>finished.pipe ; while : ; do sleep 1000; done } &  

read -t 3 FINISHED