From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-12-05T19:21:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Force a program to stop if runtime exceeds given duration

2008/12/4 Aldric Giacomoni <"aldric[remove]"@trevoke.net>:
> I don't need atomic precision - I need to stop a task that runs overnight
> (being 5 minutes off would not be a problem) so that it's not still running
> when a user gets to their machine.

If you start your job via crontab another reasonably simple approach
would be to store the PID in a file on startup and schedule another
script 5 hours later that simply sends a kill -INT (or whatever). The
you can handle the signal in your main script and do whatever you need
to to to clean up and exit.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end