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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

Apparently timeout(1) is part of GNU Coreutils. I wasn't sure after reading whether it was part of Bash itself.

Also, watch out because like many things the timeout command and args differs between /usr/bin/timeout or gtimeout in Brew (that's where the "g" prefix comes from). I haven't used BSD in order to know what it's story is

Prefixing GNU coreutils with "g" is common on most non-Linux Unix systems; it prevents conflicts with the base system (gmake/gtar vs make/tar).

But also sucks because the g-prefixed versions aren’t installed on Linux systems which means scripts that rely on them are not portable.

Thankfully bash tolerates that, if the script author cares, e.g.

  gnu_sed=gsed
  if ! command -v $gnu_sed; then
    gnu_sed=$(detector_wizardry)
  fi
  $gnu_sed -Ee ...

> It’s a shame we can’t use timeout with until directly

The until keyword is part of the POSIX.2 shell specification, which does not include any sort of timeout functionality. It could be implemented in bash, but it would not be portable to other shells (Debian dash being the main concern).

This is the reason that it is implemented as a separate utility.

Search for "The until loop" below to see the specification.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

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