[Toybox] RFC: timeout -i

[enh]

yeah, i've wanted similar in the past. "is this command actually hung, or
does it just have a lot to do?" are two very different cases. if i didn't
already mention this on the list (and it seems that i didn't) it may be
because i couldn't decide whether it should be a timeout(1) option or a
pv(1) option [https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pv.1.html]. but given
that we don't have pv, and iirc i only learned about it because i was
searching around for an answer to _this_ problem, which it doesn't actually
solve...

(but, yeah, --long-only is the safe route unless you think you can persuade
busybox and/or coreutils to join in the fun.)

On Mon, Jul 4, 2022 at 3:28 AM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> I want a timeout that only kills a command for inactivity (seconds passing
> with
> no output), and it really seems like a thing "timeout" should be able to
> do, and
> it's not HARD to implement (pass the output data through a pipe, copy it to
> stdout resetting the timer, and use poll() as the timeout mechanism
> instead of
> timer_settime()).
>
> That said, people grumble when I add new capabilities that the existing
> command
> doesn't have, so I thought I'd give a heads up to see if anybody had strong
> objections. (No, I am not having it be a --longopt-only; by that logic no
> short
> option would ever be added again and unix command line is all about short
> options.)
>
> Rob
>
> P.S. Ok, technically I should do a pty instead of a pipe if output is to a
> terminal, but I can't be bothered, -i mode would have that side effect.
> And it's
> a little awkward having different coeepaths for -i and non -i in the same
> command, but... eh? The non-i timeout code's already there, and
> xrun()/xpoll()
> are already in lib/net.c so it's probably not much new...
>
> P.P.S. The motivating case here is running "make tests" under mkroot,
> where the
> qemu instance can take an arbitrarily long time to chug through a bunch of
> tests
> (emulation is slow, I add more tests all the time, I dunno what
> underpowered
> wind-up-toy somebody might run this on), but am comfortable saying that if
> it's
> produced no output for 30 seconds it's hung and should be killed.
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