For killing a process after a given timeout in Bash, there is a nice command called timeout
. However, I’m running my program on a multi-user server, and I don’t want the performance of my program to be influenced by others. Is there a way to kill a process in Bash, after a given time that the program is really running?
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Answer
On Bash+Linux, you can use ulimit -t
. Here’s from help ulimit
:
-t the maximum amount of cpu time in seconds
Here’s an example:
$ time bash -c 'ulimit -t 5; while true; do true; done' Killed real 0m8.549s user 0m4.983s sys 0m0.008s
The infinite loop process was scheduled (i.e. actually ran) for a total of 5 seconds before it was killed. Due to other processes competing for the CPU at the same time, this took 8.5 seconds of wall time.
A command like sleep 3600
would never be killed, since it doesn’t use any CPU time.