Re: feature enhancement for 'timeout' (original) (raw)

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From: Pádraig Brady
Subject: Re: feature enhancement for 'timeout'
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 01:11:51 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130110 Thunderbird/17.0.2

On 02/25/2014 09:51 PM, Thomas Sattler wrote:

Am 25.02.2014 18:04, schrieb Pádraig Brady: > On 02/25/2014 04:57 PM, Thomas Sattler wrote: >> Am 25.02.2014 17:30, schrieb Pádraig Brady: >>> On 02/25/2014 04:10 PM, Thomas Sattler wrote: >>>> How about exporting the DURATION to the command's environment? >>> >>> So you mean for timeout(1) to inspect the env and honor a DURATION there? >> >> No, I thought of timeout(1) informing its child process about the >> duration. So the command could know about the timeout. (Just for >> the unusual case where it could want to know and care about it.) >> >> I'm aware that most commands run via timeout(1) will not make use >> of this. On the other hand letting timeout(1) put the duration >> into its client process' environment shouldn't hurt either. > > I'm getting it hard to think of a use case where the managed command > could make use of prior knowledge of the timeout.

You're right, the managed command won't make use of the knowledge of its maximum lifetime. But that wasn't the idea.

I thought of a process that can make use of its environment to build strings, for example filenames, and then would be able to include the specified duration as a part of a filename.

I would love to see two keys in the child process' environment: The unmodified string as it was given to timeout(1) and the computed seconds. Something like this:

TIMEOUTVALUE=3m TIMEOUTSECONDS=180

I think this is too specialized to add to timeout(1). Note timeout(1) will propagate env through to the managed command, so you can set variables as you like:

$ TIMEOUT_VALUE=1 timeout 1 env | grep TIMEOUT TIMEOUT_VALUE=1

thanks, Pádraig.