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rlb.usa
Asked: 2010-01-26 13:28:45 +0800 CST

can you help me with this simple 'ulimit'?

  • 772

I have a badly coded infinite looping program that I want to run on the command line - but not forever. I want to use ulimit so if it loops forever, it gets cut off.

I'm trying:

$> bash -c "ulimit -t 1; java myinfloopprogram"

but it's like nothing is happening. What's going on, is my commandline command wrong? myinfloopprogram runs just fine.

I'm running a terminal and the version is Ubuntu 9.10 .

ubuntu bash shell ulimit

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Is the looping program actually using CPU?

    -t is for CPU time, not wall clock time, so if your program is not actually using any CPU time it won't be killed.

    • 6

  2. Maybe try something like this instead:

    java myinfloopprogram &
pid=$!
for i in $(seq 1 60); do
    kill -0 $pid >/dev/null || break
    sleep 1
done
kill -0 $pid >/dev/null || kill -TERM $pid
    • 1

  3. ulimit is probably not what you need. You need some sort of bash timeout feature. There's nothing built into bash, but there are a few scripts floating around to do this. eg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/687948/timeout-a-command-in-bash-without-unnecessary-delay

    • 1