About commandline tool "timeout": Start COMMAND, and kill it if still running after DURATION.
A new team mate wasted some time to debug why a process was killed with signal 15. I think it would be nice to have an --verbose option, and a some text which explains why the signal was send. This is important in environments where the one who reads the script failures is not the same person who writes the script. What do you think? Example: Old: user@host:~$ timeout 1s ping localhost PING localhost (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.078 ms New: user@host:~$ timeout 1s ping localhost PING localhost (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.078 ms ** Process "ping localhost" was killed with signal 16 since the timeout of 1s was reached. ** -- Thomas Guettler http://www.thomas-guettler.de/
