Bob Proulx writes: > > P=E1draig Brady wrote: > > Paul Eggert wrote: > > > I'd like to have an option to 'timeout' so that > > > it merely calls alarm(2) and then execs COMMAND. > > > This would be simple and fast would avoid the problem > > > in question. This approach has its own issues, but > > > when it works it works great, and it'd be a nice option. > > I agree. It is nice and simple and well understood. > > > The main problem with that is would only send the signal to the > > first process, and any processes it started would keep running. > > Then that is a problem for that parent process to keep track of its > own children. It is a recursive situation. If all processes are well > behaved then it works okay. And if you ask about processes that are > not well behaved then my response would be to fix them so that they > are better behaved.
That sounds reasonable, but then if something is about to be killed by timeout, there's reason to believe it's not behaving well at the moment. -- Alan Curry
