Infrequently but repeatedly I've wanted a shell script to be able to start a background command, wait up to a certain duration for the command to finish, and then if it hasn't finished, the script continues, leaving the background command to continue executing. Other people desire this, too, e.g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/84973/timeout-without-killing-process-in-bash You can get this effect (without a wait loop) using "sleep NNN & wait -n ...", but you get extraneous job control output and it's awkward to code.
Gnu "timeout" is the utility I would expect to implement this functionality, but it does not -- timeout won't exit until the sub-command exits no matter how you invoke it. So I am proposing adding an option to "timeout" viz. "-n/--no-wait" whose effect is "after the timeout is triggered and timeout sends the specified signal(s), timeout continues without waiting for the command to exit". When this combined with "--signal=0", "timeout" will behave as I desire. Opinions? Dale
