Command Timeout

[Vote 539]

Greetings,

Is there a way to limit the runtime of a command in Octave?  For example, consider the naive implementation of Fibonacci:

function y = fib(n)

    if(n<=1)

        y=1;

    else

        y=fib(n-1)+fib(n-2);

    end

end

On my machine, anything above fib(25) starts to take over a second to compute.  Is there a way to programmatically terminate a command after, say, 10 seconds?  Perhaps something similar to Linux timeout(1) ?

If nothing like this yet exists, where would it fit into the Octave source?

Thanks!