force wget timeout

Question

How can i force wget to stop after X seconds? I have a script that downloads images, from time to time it gets stuck and refuses to "timeout"

what i've tried:

--tries=3 --connect-timeout=30

from ps aux:

root     26543  0.0  0.0  38636  1656 ?        S    20:40   0:00 wget -nc --tries=3 --connect-timeout=30 --restrict-file-names=nocontrol -O 18112012/image.jpg http://site/image.jpg

Answer 1

You can run the wget command as a background process and send a SIGKILL to forcibly kill it after sleeping for a certain amount of time.

wget ... &
wget_pid=$!
counter=0
timeout=60
while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]]
do
    sleep 1
    counter=$(($counter+1))
done
if [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") ]]; then
    kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid"
fi

Explanation:

• wget ... & - the & notation at the end runs the command in the background as opposed to the foreground
• wget_pid=$! - $! is a special shell variable that contains the process id of the most recently executed command. Here we save it to a variable called wget_pid.
• while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]] - Look for the process every one second, if it's still there, keep waiting until a timeout limit.
• kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid" - We use kill to forcibly kill the wget process running in the background by sending it a SIGKILL signal.

Answer 2

Easiest way is to use the timeout(1) command, part of GNU coreutils, so available pretty much anywhere bash is installed:

timeout 60 wget ..various wget args..

or if you want to hard-kill wget if its running too long:

timeout -s KILL 60 wget ..various wget args..

Answer 3

Community wiki because this is mostly a copy of sampson-chen's answer, but I wanted to point out a couple of things:

wget ... &
# Strictly speaking you can just use the job number,
# which is probably %1, but saving the pid is also fine.
wget_pid=$! 
counter=0
timeout=60
# use kill -0 to check if a pid is still running
while kill -0 "$wget_pid" && (( counter < timeout )); do
    sleep 1
    (( counter++ ))
done
# if killing nothing is distasteful, use kill -0 one more time.
# also think a SIGKILL is overkill since the question doesn't imply wget needs it.
kill -0 "$wget_pid" && kill "$wget_pid"