On systems with recent glibc, this abuse of timeout elicits the expected error:
$ src/timeout -- -1.189731495357231765e+4932 sleep 0 src/timeout: invalid time interval ‘-1.189731495357231765e+4932’ Try 'src/timeout --help' for more information. But with glibc-2.12's strtod, that input maps to a double-precision value of 0 rather than to -inf, so timeout does this: $ src/timeout -- -1.189731495357231765e+4932 sleep 0; echo $? 0 Similarly, the sleep.sh test fails because even without the leading "-", that number ($LDBL_MAX) maps to 0: $ src/timeout 0.1 sleep 1.189731495357231765e+4932; echo $? 0 which causes two tests to fail: tests/misc/timeout-parameters tests/misc/sleep I see a couple of ways to avoid trouble. Perhaps the most general is to make gnulib's strtod module detect and compensate for these errors. But that's CentOS6-era glibc, so maybe not worth it for such a corner case.
