How to get rid of "Alarm clock" message in perl timeout?

Question

[user@notebook ~] time perl -e 'alarm shift @ARGV; exec @ARGV' 1 sleep 2
Alarm clock

real    0m1.004s
user    0m0.004s
sys 0m0.000s
[user@notebook ~] 

My question: how can I get rid of that "Alarm clock" message?? I just want to terminate a process after given time with a perl oneliner..

Answer 1

That message is from bash, not Perl.

One way is to run it in a subshell:

$ ( time perl -e 'alarm shift @ARGV; exec @ARGV' 1 sleep 2 )

real    0m1.004s
user    0m0.003s
sys 0m0.000s

Answer 2

If you want to run a command with a timeout, you may want to try the command timeout and avoid reinventing the wheel:

timeout 2 sleep 3

If you get an exit code of 124, the time has run out. Otherwise, you'll get the exit code of the executed command.

It's part of the GNU coreutils package, you're likely to already have it.