timeout doesn't work with accumulo shell in bash script

Question

I'm trying to check if a scan of an Accumulo table times out (to see if the table is corrupted).

#!/bin/bash

timeout -s KILL 20s accumulo shell -zi myInstance -u root -p secret -e "scan -np -t myTable"

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo 'Scan successful'
else
  echo 'Scan timed out'
fi

The script runs the full 20 seconds and doesn't execute the accumulo shell command, and also returns a 0 exit status incorrectly.

If I run the above timeout command in a terminal the command runs as expected. If I run a basic timeout command (e.g. timeout -s KILL 20s sleep 10) in the script or in a terminal, that works as well. So for some reason the combination of a timeout and accumulo shell command in a bash script does not work.

• Accumulo version: 1.6.0-cdh4.6.0
• OS version: CentOS 6.6

Answer 1

I discovered the issue stems from running the command in a different shell. If I run the script using the source command, e.g. source myScript.sh, the script runs as expected.

However, I haven't yet been able to track down why running the combination of timeout and accummulo shell in a different shell doesn't work.