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TIMEOUT(1) General Commands Manual TIMEOUT(1)

timeoutrun a command with a time limit

timeout [-fp] [-k time] [-s signal] duration command [arg ...]

The timeout utility executes command and kills it if it is still running after the specified duration. If duration is 0, the timeout is disabled.

The options are as follows:

, --foreground
Do not propagate the timeout signal to children processes.
time, --kill-after=time
Send a second signal, SIGKILL, if the command is still running time after the first signal was sent.
, --preserve-status
Always exit with the same status as command, even if the timeout was reached.
signal, --signal=signal
A non-negative decimal number or symbolic signal name specifying the signal to send on timeout, instead of the default SIGTERM.

duration and time may contain a decimal fraction. The value defaults to seconds unless a unit suffix is given.

The supported unit suffixes are:

s
seconds
m
minutes
h
hours
d
days

If the timeout was not reached or -p was set, the exit status of command is returned.

If the timeout was reached and -p was not set, an exit status of 124 is returned.

If command exited after receiving a signal, the exit status returned is the signal number plus 128.

kill(1), signal(3)

The timeout utility first appeared in GNU Coreutils 7.0 and has been available since OpenBSD 7.0.

January 12, 2023 OpenBSD-current