Executing another program from C++ with specified running timeout

Question

I'm writing a program (A genetic algorithm implementation) which executes another program using "system" method to calculate fitness. The problem is that another program sometimes hangs for unlimited amount of time. How can I execute a program with some time limit from C++.

Both POSIX and c++ solutions are appreciated. And more or less this will be run once application so solution doesn't have to be very elegant.

I'm running Linux CentOS distribution and am testing on Cygwin. For compiler I use gcc 4.1.2 with boost library.

Any help is apreciated

Answer 1

Instead of system, execute the program with the fork/exec idiom. Before the exec, set RLIMIT_CPU to a maximum value with setrlimit in the child.

Make sure the child does not ignore SIGXCPU (which is very unlikely).

Answer 2

You could create a timer (with boost timer for example) and then try to kill the child process... this assume that you use fork and exec to launch all your child, and you stored each pid.