Timelimit Program
The timelimit is a utility that executes a given command with a given time limit. If the mentioned command is terminated before mentioned time, then the timelimit silently exit. Before killing the command, the timelimit sends a warning to the command and then sends a kill signal.timelimit provides more options than the timeout command which is very useful.
Timelimit Installation:
For Debian based systems like Ubuntu, use the following command:
sudo apt install timelimit
For arch Linux or arch-based OS, install using AUR. Use the following command:
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/timelimit.git && cd timelimit && makepkg -sri
Using timelimit
The basic syntax to use the timelimit is as follows:
timelimit [-pq] [-S killsig] [-s warnsig] [-T killtime] [-t warntime] command [arguments …]
The default values of the timelimit options are as follows:
- warntime(-t) : 3600
- warnsig(-s) : 15
- killtime(-T):120
- killsig(-S): 9
Here is one example of the timelimit command:
To know more about the timelimit command, read the man page of timelimit using man command:
man timelimit
Run command with time limit in Linux
In Linux, some commands take a long time to run, and we wait for the complete command but for some commands, we terminate that command using the kill command after some time. What if we automate the termination of long-running commands after some time. Yes, we can do it in Linux. There are two ways we can limit the time for the command, one is the timeout command and another is using the timelimit program.