Force wget to timeout

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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..

Solution 3:

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 "https://www.google.com/"

This example will try once to connect and get URL https://www.google.com. After 4 seconds it will timeout.