Shell Script command timeout

Question

I am trying to run a command but if the command doesnt succeed in an amount of time (Lets say 30s for example), Cancel out the command and fail out. The script is fairly simple and I am just pausing ntpd and then forcing a time synchronization and starting. However if there is an invalid ntp server this hangs.

systemctl stop ntpd
ntpd -gq
systemctl start ntpd

My thoughts would be, I try to run this in the background, check every 10 seconds to see if the command is still attempting to be run. And say after 3 checks if i see "ntpd -gq" I kill the process and return a failure. Is this the correct way to do this or is there any built in time handling?

Answer 1

The shell doesn't have this kind of time handling.

Running the process in the background and checking it periodically as you suggested is the best way to handle this.