$ rpm -q kernel glibc bash kernel-2.6.40.4-5.fc15.x86_64 glibc-2.14.1-6.x86_64 bash-4.2.10-4.fc15.x86_64
I notice the following will wait for 5 seconds for the timeout process to end with SIGALRM, rather than immediately due to kill sending the SIGTERM. $ timeout 5 sleep 10& pid=$!; echo $pid >&2; kill $pid; wait [1] 4895 4895 [1]+ Exit 124 timeout 5 sleep 10 If you put a small sleep in, the race is avoided, and SIGTERM is sent to the timeout process. $ timeout 5 sleep 10& pid=$!; echo $pid >&2; sleep .1; kill $pid; wait [1] 4935 4935 [1]+ Exit 143 timeout 5 sleep 10 I tried dash and ksh and they don't exhibit the behavior where SIGTERM is ignored. You can see here that the shell is terminating before timeout is execd dash$ timeout 5 sleep 10& pid=$!; echo $pid >&2; kill $pid; wait 5088 [1] + Terminated timeout 5 sleep 10 thanks, Pádraig.
