Subject: bug#41634: 'timeout' returning 124 and 133

From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2020 22:04:14 +0200

On 2020-07-05 12:53, Jonny Grant wrote:
> Your patch looks great.

Thanks, pushed (with the minor tweak mentioned below) at:
  https://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=49bd08aea

> Is it worth clarifying that --kill-after=0s would send the KILL signal immediately after TERM?
> $ timeout --kill-after=0s 2s du -h

As the signal handler for the regular signal (TERM) does probably not have
enough time to do anything before being KILLed, this use case would better
be written as:

  $ timeout -s KILL 2s du -h

Not sure this is worth an extra explanation.

> Is it worth rejecting this? At the moment the -k is just ignored.
> $ timeout -k 2s 0s du -h

Hmm, rejecting is a bit harsh.  The question is if this is really
a problem for the users?  I mean once a user knows there is a -k
option, I would expect that she has read the documentation about
how to use it.
It is mentioned both in the Texinfo manual and in the --help output:

  A duration of 0 disables the associated timeout.

I squashed in the following little change:

  -This option has no effect if @command{timeout}'s duration is 0 and therefore
  +This option has no effect if @command{timeout}'s duration is 0 which
   disables the associated timeout.

Have a nice day,
Berny