Kill process after timeout (python script) 2009-01-11 =====================================================

This very simple and small python script starts a process, and kills it if it has not ended in a timely fashion.

Very simple, and uses polling instead of the alarm() function, but enough for me at the moment.

#!/bin/python

from sys import argv
from sys import exit
from time import sleep
from time import time
from os import kill
from signal import SIGKILL
import subprocess

def print_help():
print "Usage: $0 timeout command [args ...]"

if len(argv) < 3:
    print_help()exit(1)

proc = subprocess.Popen(argv[2:])
start = time()

while time() - start < int(argv[1]):
    sleep(0.2)
    ret = proc.poll()
    if ret != None:
        exit(ret)

# time's up: kill the proc:
print "Killing PID %d, it did not end after %d seconds." % (proc.pid,int(argv[1]))
kill(proc.pid, SIGKILL)
exit(proc.wait())