Re: feature enhancement for 'timeout'

[Thomas Sattler]

Am 25.02.2014 18:04, schrieb Pádraig Brady:
> On 02/25/2014 04:57 PM, Thomas Sattler wrote:
>> Am 25.02.2014 17:30, schrieb Pádraig Brady:
>>> On 02/25/2014 04:10 PM, Thomas Sattler wrote:
>>>> How about exporting the DURATION to the command's environment?
>>>
>>> So you mean for timeout(1) to inspect the env and honor a DURATION there?
>>
>> No, I thought of timeout(1) informing its child process about the
>> duration. So the command could know about the timeout. (Just for
>> the unusual case where it could want to know and care about it.)
>>
>> I'm aware that most commands run via timeout(1) will not make use
>> of this. On the other hand letting timeout(1) put the duration
>> into its client process' environment shouldn't hurt either.
> 
> I'm getting it hard to think of a use case where the managed command
> could make use of prior knowledge of the timeout.

You're right, the managed command won't make use of the knowledge of
its maximum lifetime. But that wasn't the idea.

I thought of a process that can make use of its environment to build
strings, for example filenames, and then would be able to include
the specified duration as a part of a filename.

I would love to see two keys in the child process' environment: The
unmodified string as it was given to timeout(1) and the computed
seconds. Something like this:

  TIMEOUT_VALUE=3m
  TIMEOUT_SECONDS=180

Thomas