Bash Cookbook

Leveraging timeout when waiting for command completion

Sometimes, waiting for a command to finish execution or ignoring commands until completion might not be considered a solid practice in scripting, though it does have applications:

• Where commands take variable lengths of time to complete (for example, pinging a network host)
• Where tasks or commands can be executed in such a way that the master script waits for the success or failure of several multiple operations

However, the important thing to note is that timeout/wait requires a process, or even a subshell so that it can be monitored (by the Process ID or PID). In this recipe, we will demonstrate the use of waiting for a subshell with the timeout command (which was added into the coreutils ...