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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T13:58:02+00:00

What’s the best way of executing a command and then killing it after some

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What’s the best way of executing a command and then killing it after some time? Here’s what I have; it does the job, but I get amp: command not found and although I’m not sure why the amp is there in the first place, I know that the killing doesn’t work without it.

feh "$output""$ext" &
echo $!
sleep 1
kill -s 9 $!
exit 1

The thing is that I don’t know the PID of the process I’m executing. Could I assign one upon execution?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    GNU timeout, part of recent versions of coreutils, does exactly what you want.

    timeout 1 feh "$output""$ext"

    runs feh for one second and then kills it, if it hasn’t already ended.

    The rest of this comment concerns your current recipe:

    The recipe you’re currently using puts feh into the background using the &. The amp; after it is a mistake, likely from some overzealous HTML encoder (& is how you spell & in HTML).

    Every process is assigned a PID by the kernel when launched. $! is the shell variable for the pid of the most recently backgrounded process.

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