I have a Debian Sid box that I’d been putting off updating for a while so finally got around to doing it tonight. I took the opportunity to do a bit of spring cleaning and purge old packages I installed to play with and forgot to purge or removed instead of purging. While doing this I discovered an interestingly named package,
timeout
.
timeout
is a dead simple command, everything you need to know about it you can get from the usage information:
[michael@orion(~)] timeout
usage: timeout [-signal] time command…
And an example:
[michael@orion(~)] timeout 5 cat
Timeout: aborting command “cat” with signal 9
Killed
[michael@orion(~)]
How did I not know about this before?!?