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If and How is it possible to, in Terminal, to get an application to run for 30 seconds, before being force closed, and echoing the logs of that process?

Braiam
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ir-g
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  • @JacobVlijm It would ideally run as a shell script due to the portability of the language, mainly as the intended area of usage is a CI service. – ir-g Apr 27 '14 at 14:18
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    @ir-g you can use the timeout command. e.g. timeout 30s command – mcantsin Apr 27 '14 at 14:21

2 Answers2

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You might want to use the timeout command.

timeout -k 10s 30s command

which will run the command for 30s and kill it after 10s if still running. - Check the manpage for more options.

mcantsin
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    @ir-g you're welcome. You might also want to check out the watch command, which is similar and also very easy to use in the command line. – mcantsin Apr 27 '14 at 14:47
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    Thanks for that pointer, watch strikes me as a very interesting command. Could come in handy... – ir-g Apr 27 '14 at 15:03
3

Here are two ways (but the timeout command suggested by mcantsin is probably better):

  1. Launch the command in the background, that way its PID is saved in $! and you can use that to kill it after the specified time:

    command &
sleep 30 && kill $!

  2. Launch the command and use pkill or killall to kill it. CAUTION: This assumes that only one command with that name is running, I am using firefox as an example:

    firefox &
sleep 30 && pkill firefox

I have no idea what you mean by "the logs of that process" but a process's standard error can be saved to a file with command 2> logfile.txt.

Community
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terdon
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