bug#70219: Bug/Issue with timeout and signals

[Branden R. Williams]

I was integrating the timeout command into a shell script and realized the 
manpage & the --help docs do not accurately describe how the tool works. In 
addition, there appears to be a bug related to arguments passed. I am running 
version 9.1.

According to the help screen, this command should work:

        timeout -k 10s ping example.com <http://example.com/>

It fails, however, because the next argument after invoking -k is the kill 
signal you want to send. The command (to send a SIGKILL) must be:

        timeout -k 9 10s ping example.com <http://example.com/>

I believe the kill after functionality and docs should be modified to send a 
default signal of SIGTERM without an additional argument so the first iteration 
above would work. Then you could explain that if you wanted to send a DIFFERENT 
signal, use the -s flag that is there to pass one. But according to the docs, 
the first command SHOULD work. Even using the --kill-after= syntax passes in 
the kill signal into that argument, not the actual time.

Thank you for your consideration and for maintaining such a critical set of 
tools! 

Regards,

B