I want a timeout that only kills a command for inactivity (seconds passing with no output), and it really seems like a thing "timeout" should be able to do, and it's not HARD to implement (pass the output data through a pipe, copy it to stdout resetting the timer, and use poll() as the timeout mechanism instead of timer_settime()).
That said, people grumble when I add new capabilities that the existing command doesn't have, so I thought I'd give a heads up to see if anybody had strong objections. (No, I am not having it be a --longopt-only; by that logic no short option would ever be added again and unix command line is all about short options.) Rob P.S. Ok, technically I should do a pty instead of a pipe if output is to a terminal, but I can't be bothered, -i mode would have that side effect. And it's a little awkward having different coeepaths for -i and non -i in the same command, but... eh? The non-i timeout code's already there, and xrun()/xpoll() are already in lib/net.c so it's probably not much new... P.P.S. The motivating case here is running "make tests" under mkroot, where the qemu instance can take an arbitrarily long time to chug through a bunch of tests (emulation is slow, I add more tests all the time, I dunno what underpowered wind-up-toy somebody might run this on), but am comfortable saying that if it's produced no output for 30 seconds it's hung and should be killed. _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net
