Automatically kill scripts and commands after a certain duration

When running scripts, we might want to restrict the time for which a script runs. May be printing out the logs for 10 minutes and then stop automatically or stopping a script if it does not exit by itself. We can use the command time out for this .

Timeout command runs a command for a specific duration and kills the command after that duration if it has not exited by itself.

syntax:

timeout [Duration] [command]

Let us take the following script,test.sh, as an example

#!/bin/bash sleep 15 echo "done"

The script sleeps for 15 seconds and then prints the message done.

If we run the script with timeout of 5 seconds the message "done" will not get printed as the script will get killed before 15 seconds as shown below.

timeout 5 bash test.sh

Running the script with out the timeout, we will see the message done being printed.

bash test.sh done