Question

I have this command:

awk 'BEGIN {system ("mplayer mms :// xx.xx.xx -dumpstream -dumpfile xxx.wmv")}'

How to end this command after 60 seconds?

Answer 1

You can get the pid of a bash subprocess by querying $!. Store the value of the awk process, sleep for 60 seconds and the kill the awk process.

awk 'BEGIN {system ("mplayer mms :// xx.xx.xx -dumpstream -dumpfile xxx.wmv")}' &
pid=$!
sleep 60
kill $pid

This requires that you run the awk process as a background process & so that the parent control continues.