GNU bug report logs - #9101
timeout should use setitimer if available

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Package: coreutils;

Reported by: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>

Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:29:02 UTC

Severity: normal

Tags: fixed

Done: Assaf Gordon <assafgordon <at> gmail.com>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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From: Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 9101 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#9101: timeout should use setitimer if available
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:59:00 +0200

Paul Eggert wrote:
> setitimer has nanosecond resolution, which is better than the
> one-second resolution that 'alarm' has.  timeout should use
> setitimer if available, to take advantage of this.  On 64-bit
> hosts, this has the additional advantage of increasing the
> upper bound for timeouts from 2**31 seconds to 2**63 seconds
> (about 68 years to about 292 billion years, which should be
> long enough for most practical purposes :-).

I like the idea of supporting a sub-second timeout interval, but it
probably deserves a warning in the documentation.  Even a command like
"timeout 3 sleep 1" will timeout on a system under heavy load.
This bug report was last modified 6 years and 280 days ago.

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