Question

I have an R script written to benchmark a shell command with a range of arguments. The R script just subtracts the start time from the end time for each benchmark. The problem is that some of these arguments cause the shell command (a Python script) to run endlessly.

How can I script R to kill the shell command after a certain amount of time? Fixing the underlying problem with the Python script is not something I can do at this point.

Answer 1

On Unix, you can use timeout as part of your shell-ed command:

timeout 5s sleep 20

Within R,

cmd <- "sleep 20"
timeout <- 5
system(paste0("timeout ", timeout, "s ", cmd))