Processes with timeout

[Ivan Voras]

Markus Franz wrote:
> How can I make it sure that every child-process terminates after x senconds
> (wether it has finished or not)?

You can toy around with signals. From outside the child process, you can 
send it SIGTERM after some time has passed (and catch it in the process). 
 From inside the process, you can use SIGALARM to track when the time has 
expired. Or you can combine the two.

Or, you can start a "watchdog thread" (a thread that mostly sleep()-s, but 
now and then checks the time)