Raimondas Kiveris wrote:
> 
> I have following problem:
> 
> I have to use run-shell-command in a multithreaded application.
> Run-shell-command with :wait t apparently suspends all other
> threads and if external process takes significant time to complete
> the whole application practically hangs.
> 
> What I am looking for is a way to apply timeout to run-shell-command.
> 
> mp:with-timeout unfortunately does not work:
> 
> USER(33): (time (mp:with-timeout (2 :timed-out) (excl:run-shell-command
> "sleep 10")))
> ; cpu time (non-gc) 0 msec user, 0 msec system
> ; cpu time (gc)     0 msec user, 0 msec system
> ; cpu time (total)  0 msec user, 0 msec system
> >>> ; real time  10,035 msec <<<
> ; space allocation:
> ;  100 cons cells, 0 symbols, 0 other bytes, 0 static bytes
> :TIMED-OUT
> 
> Tried this with ACL 5 and 6 on Linux and Solaris.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
>         rkv

Yes. You have to write your own wait loop.

If you invoke run-shell-command with wait nil you will get back a PID.
Then you can loop waiting for the process to finish. In the timed-out body
you have to put some form that would send a sigkill to the process you are waiting
for. It is a little tricky, since you should/could monitor for your spawned process
to terminate or to be signaled. For this matter, we actually implemented our own
wait function, that returns not only the termination of the spawned process, but
also how the process terminated. The implementation of this "augmented" wait function
would be OS dependent.

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