Very Computer

1. Killing a child process if it hangs

I have a script which spawns some 20-100 child processes which run
scripts on remote systems. Sometimes, some of the children hang
(e.g. because of NFS/network problems). Moreover, I must check
400 hosts with 5-20 at a time.

What I need is a way to wait for a certain time (say 2 minutes)
and then kill the hanging children (and all child processes) with -9
(okokok... with kill ; sleep ; kill -9 >2 /dev/null :-).

My first solution was this:

    child | sleep 120 &

that effectively kills the child but not its children (and it has
the minor problem that I have lots of sleeps idling around).

Something like

    run work child
    run timeout child

and whichever finishes first kills the other away but how do I tell
the work child the PID of the timeout child ? I could write the
PIDs in temporary files but what if the FS is full ? and how about
races ?

--
Dipl. Inf. (FH) Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla
"(to) optimize: Make a program faster by
improving the algorithms rather than by
buying a faster machine."

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

2. in2000 SCSI drivers crashes using HD intensively

3. kill child and its all grad child processes?

4. The Eagle Has Landed

5. how to kill a child process that runs other children processes

6. Win95 -> Linux assistance

7. Unable to kill hung processes

8. Lost a lib file. Please Help!

9. killing a shell script is not killing child processes

10. Apache 1.0.5: Killing Child Processes

11. Does killing parent kill children?

12. How can kill all child processes without killing parent process ?

13. Apache v1.1.1 not always killing child processes