Kill process after a given time bash?

Question

I have a script that tries to make a DB connection using another program and the timeout(2.5min) of the program is to long. I want to add this functionality to the script.

Answer 1

There's a GNU coreutils utility called timeout: http://www.gnu.org/s/coreutils/manual/html_node/timeout-invocation.html

If you have it on your platform, you could do:

timeout 5 CONNECT_TO_DB
if [ $? -eq 124 ]; then
    # Timeout occurred
else
    # No hang
fi