While messing around with Sun Cluster 3.2, I came across hatimerun. This nifty program can be used to run a program in a fixed amount of time, and kill the program if it runs longer that the time alloted to it. If hatimerun kills a program, it will return a status code of 99. If the program runs in it’s alloted time, hatimerun will return a status code of 0. To use hatimerun, you need to pass a time interval to the “-t” option, as well as a program to run in that time interval:
$ hatimerun -t 10 /bin/sleep 8
$ echo ?
0
$ hatimerun -t 10 /bin/sleep 12
$ echo ?
99
If anyone knows of a general purpose tool for doing this (preferably something that ships with Solaris or Redhat Enterprise Linux), I would appreciate it if you could leave a comment with further details.