How to stop do while read line shell script after certain time?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I am executing this command:

tail -f rest.log | while read 
LOGLINE
do
    [[ "${LOGLINE}" == *"Finished f="https://forum.tuteehub.com/tag/building">building"* ]] && pkill -P $$ tail
done

It will read a log file until string 'Finished building' appears in the file. If so, it will kill the tailcommand. Sometimes the string will never appear. For this case I want to quit the loop after a certain time. Kind of a timeout. Lets say it should stop searching the string after 5 minutes. How can I achieve this? I tried to use timeout in front of the first tail command, which did not work for me.

manpreet 3 years ago

Try this: read has built in timeout option -t!

while read -t 10 LOGLINE 
do
  [[ "${LOGLINE}" == *"Finished building"* ]] && pkill -P $$ tail
 done

The above terminates after 10 seconds. Mention your required timeout in seconds. For more refer man read

read [-ers] [-a aname] [-d delim] [-i text] [-n nchars] [-N nchars] [-p prompt] [-t timeout] [-u fd] [name ...]