TIMED-PROCESS(1)

💅 TIMED-PROCESS(1) — the perl section of the manual, bestie 🎀

okay so real talk, this one lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of the man pages, and honestly? she's giving "small script, big main character energy." 🌟

✨ NAME ✨

timed-process — run a background process for a limited amount of time ⏳💖

Like, you give it a time limit and it will hold your little command to it. no cap.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

timed-process [-e exit_status] timeout command [<arg> [<arg> ...]]

ok so it's timed-process, then optionally -e exit_status, then your timeout, then the command, then however many <arg>s you wanna pass along. the way that syntax just flows 🫶

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea, bestie: this script runs command for a specified amount of time, and if it doesn't finish? it kills the process. periodt. 💀✨

if command runs and exits before the given timeout, timed-process returns the exit value of command. slay, normal behavior, love that for you.

but if command did not exit before timeout seconds, then timed-process will kill the process and return an exit value of 255 — unless the -e command line option is set, which instructs timed-process to return a different exit value instead. 🔥

ngl this is the whole point: it lets the user of timed-process figure out whether the process ended normally or was straight-up killed. exit 255 = "bestie got got." 💅

🧚 a lil sign-off 🎀

this icon of a man page is brought to you by perl v5.42.3, dated 2023-04-22 — written in the TIMED-PROCESS(1) era and honestly she ate. 🍓💜