From: "weathercoach@..." <weathercoach@...>
Date: 2007-12-15T11:45:00+09:00
Subject: help with timeout and IO.popen (newb)

   Hello Folks.  I'm running ruby 1.8.6 on Solaris 10 i86pc.

  I have a script where I use IO.popen to execute some system
commands.   I want to timeout the execution of the system commands if
they take too long to execute.   So I read about the timeout library
and have been playing with that.   However I think I am missing
something.

  In this example I felt I was setting the timeout to 5 seconds and
that the script will continue down it's execution path if the command
called within IO.popen takes longer than 5 seconds

require 'timeout'

begin
  timeout(5) {
   IO.popen("/usr/bin/sleep 10") {|f|
   exit_code = Process.waitpid2(f.pid)[1] >> 8
   }
  }
rescue Timeout::Error
  puts "timed out"
end

   However upon execution the timeout never occurs *and* the rescue
clause is executed?

time ./timeouttest1
timed out

real    0m10.020s
user    0m0.007s
sys     0m0.007s


   I've read the timout documentation and poked through the timeout.rb
file but I still don't understand what I'm missing.   Any tips are
appreciated.
   TIA.  G.