Force wget to timeout

How can I force wget to stop after X seconds?

I have a script that downloads images and from time to time it gets stuck and refuses to "timeout".

What I've tried:

--tries=3 --connect-timeout=30 

From ps aux:

root 26543 0.0 0.0 38636 1656 ? S 20:40 0:00 wget -nc --tries=3 --connect-timeout=30 --restrict-file-names=nocontrol -O 18112012/image.jpg 

5 Answers

You can run the wget command as a background process and send a SIGKILL to forcibly kill it after sleeping for a certain amount of time.

wget ... & wget_pid=$! counter=0 timeout=60 while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]] do sleep 1 counter=$(($counter+1)) done if [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") ]]; then kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid" fi 

Explanation:

• wget ... & - the & notation at the end runs the command in the background as opposed to the foreground
• wget_pid=$! - $! is a special shell variable that contains the process id of the most recently executed command. Here we save it to a variable called wget_pid.
• while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]] - Look for the process every one second, if it's still there, keep waiting until a timeout limit.
• kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid" - We use kill to forcibly kill the wget process running in the background by sending it a SIGKILL signal.

Easiest way is to use the timeout(1) command, part of GNU coreutils, so available pretty much anywhere bash is installed:

timeout 60 wget ..various wget args.. 

or if you want to hard-kill wget if its running too long:

timeout -s KILL 60 wget ..various wget args.. 

Recent wget versions (1.19+, at least) allow to set a timeout:

 -T, --timeout=SECONDS set all timeout values to SECONDS --dns-timeout=SECS set the DNS lookup timeout to SECS --connect-timeout=SECS set the connect timeout to SECS --read-timeout=SECS set the read timeout to SECS --waitretry=SECONDS wait 1..SECONDS between retries of a retrieval -t, --tries=NUMBER set number of retries to NUMBER (0 unlimits) 

Example

wget --timeout 4 --tries 1 "" 

This example will try once to connect and get URL . After 4 seconds it will timeout.

Community wiki because this is mostly a copy of sampson-chen's answer, but I wanted to point out a couple of things:

wget ... & # Strictly speaking you can just use the job number, # which is probably %1, but saving the pid is also fine. wget_pid=$! counter=0 timeout=60 # use kill -0 to check if a pid is still running while kill -0 "$wget_pid" && (( counter < timeout )); do sleep 1 (( counter++ )) done # if killing nothing is distasteful, use kill -0 one more time. # also think a SIGKILL is overkill since the question doesn't imply wget needs it. kill -0 "$wget_pid" && kill "$wget_pid" 

I recently noticed that wget 1.14 was silently ignoring the --timeout option, it worked ok when I updated it to 1.19