Timing out Linux commands

From AJS.COM

Timing out Linux commands (such as ssh) isn't as easy as it sounds. Some versions of Linux ship with a timeout wrapper, but it's never quite flexible enough for what I want.

Enter Perl

Perl makes this job quite a lot easier. I rely here on the package TimeOut which you can install by:

cpan TimeOut

as root.

Now try:

 perl -MTimeOut -e 'alarm_expired(1,sub{fork or exec @ARGV or die $!;wait})' your command here....

Of course, that leaves your process running if it times out. I'll expand on how to do process control later on when I have the time....