I was integrating the timeout command into a shell script and realized the
manpage & the --help docs do not accurately describe how the tool works. In
addition, there appears to be a bug related to arguments passed. I am running
version 9.1.
According to the help screen, this command should work:
timeout -k 10s ping example.com <http://example.com/>
It fails, however, because the next argument after invoking -k is the kill
signal you want to send. The command (to send a SIGKILL) must be:
timeout -k 9 10s ping example.com <http://example.com/>
I believe the kill after functionality and docs should be modified to send a
default signal of SIGTERM without an additional argument so the first iteration
above would work. Then you could explain that if you wanted to send a DIFFERENT
signal, use the -s flag that is there to pass one. But according to the docs,
the first command SHOULD work. Even using the --kill-after= syntax passes in
the kill signal into that argument, not the actual time.
Thank you for your consideration and for maintaining such a critical set of
tools!
Regards,
B
