Question

I’m looking for a way to run a script for x seconds with still the possibility to interrupt it before those x seconds are past.

If I didn’t need the ability to Ctrl-C I’d write

./my_script &
sleep $x
kill $!

But here if I Ctrl-C during the script the fork keeps running.

I kinda know how to kill the script if launched in a sub-shell:

trap "echo sub-script terminated" INT
(./my_script)
trap - INT

but I do not know how to transpose that to a fork (I do not get clearly the differences between the two concepts I have to admit).

EDIT: I’d like to know how portable are the solutions btw, if you can mention that in your answers, that’d be of great value to me.

Answer 1

timeout $x ./my_script

If you have a reasonably new GNU Coreutils, timeout is included there. Before, there used to be a number of slightly incompatible timeout variants from different sources (the one I have in most places comes from the Postfix distribution originally IIRC).

If you don’t have timeout for your distro, there are many shell and Perl hacks out there.