BASH tricks: how to wait with timeout for string from process

How to wait for specific string from application with timeout

Suppose you have to run some application and wait for some string that means that everything is OKey.

After that you want to kill the application. And return success exit code (for example for you CI, for make etc).

And if there is no such string we want wait for some time and after that kill the application and return error exit code.

Well you are in luck - I can show you how to do that.

In any case this example will teach you some new tricks for you BASH Kung-Fu.

In first line you use Linux command timeout that will run process that you specify in the parameter. And kill if after specified timeout.

Also I add parameter -k - so timeout will hard-kill the process if it won’t terminate gracefuly. And we need --preserve-status so timeout will return exit code from the process it controlls.

As test process I wrote Perl one-liner, it print some string, sleep for a moment and print another line. Magic $|++ in the script switchs off stdout buffering - so it does not buffer all output till end of sleep(2) and second print.

And the main trick in last line.

Of cause we could use just grep. Easy.

But grep print only matches. But we want to see all the output.

So another Perl one-liner (this is exactly the best usage of Perl - do not write big programs in Perl if you want to stay sane).

It wait for the string and exit after that with success exit code. If we did not find the string but Linux pipe already closed (that means the first process finished) it will return error exit code.

How to brew install timeout in MacOS

There is no timeout on your initial installation of MacOS, as well as many other Linux utils.

To fix that you may install coreutils.

Just remember that all the names will be with g prefix, like gtimeout. If you want tha same names as in Linux you have to modify PATH in your ~/.bashrc. Please read how on the same homebrew page.