How to limit the execution time in C

Question

I'm not a big C expert, and that's why I ask this (probably) easy question. I got a script written in C, and I'd like to limit the execution time with input.

Like: ./script.c input1 input2 input3 input4

Input4 has to be the time limit in seconds.

In php, it would be something like this:

$_GET['time'] = $time;

max_execution_time($time); or set_time_limit($time) And then I would run it like this: http://domain.com/script.php?time=60

I think that init_rand(time(NULL)); should work for the time limiting but how can I take the variable from the "GET" (input4)?

Answer 1

May be you can run this program as a child of another program.

if ((pid = fork()) < 0) {
    exit(1);
} else if (pid == 0) {
    execvp("this prog", argv);
} else  {
    sleep(atoi(argv[4]);
    kill(pid, SIGTERM);
}

Or may be you can use bash scripts to do the job.

./thisprog $1 $2 $3 &
sleep $4 
kill $! 2>/dev/null