Waitmax

Waitmax executes program in a new process. If that process does not exit within a certain time, it is being killed with signal TERM.

Waitmax is available under GPL Version 2. The precompiled RPM runs on all i386-based systems. It contains a version of waitmax which is statically linked with diet and does not need libc nor any other library.

Example usage of waitmax

Copy a large file with scp. Interrupt if this takes more than one hour:

Linux:~ > waitmax 3600 scp bigfile.tar.gz somehost:/tmp

Manpage of waitmax

waitmax(1)                     User commands                    waitmax(1)

NAME
       waitmax - allow program to run at most a specified amount of time

SYNOPSIS
       waitmax [-s signum] maxtime programm [ args...]

DESCRIPTION
       waitmax  executes  program  in  a  new  process. If process has not
       exited after at most maxtime seconds, it is being killed with  sig~
       nal TERM.

OPTIONS
       -s, --signal signum
              Use signum to kill the program instead of TERM.

       -h, --help
              Show short help and exit.

       -V, --version
              Show version and exit.

EXIT VALUES
       255    The  program  has been signalled and terminated, because the
              time has elapsed, before the program has exited itself.

       254    The program has  exited  neither  by  signal  nor  normally.
              Strange. This should never happen.

       253    The program couldn~t be executed.

       128+signum
              The  program  has  terminated  with signal signum before the
              time has elapsed (not by waitmax,  but  by  itself  or  some
              other process).

       1      Waitmax has been called with illegal options.

CREDITS
       Many  thanks  to  Jürgen Kuchenbecker, who had the idea of writing
       such a program and who assisted me in coding and testing it.

AUTHOR
       waitmax was written by Mathias Kettner.  The  most  current  source
       code is located at http://mathias-kettner.de/waitmax.html.

waitmax 1.0                     March 2008                      waitmax(1)