[UFO Chicago] Shell scripting, timeouts

[Ian Bicking]

There's this unreliable program (wvware) that is being run on a server 
I'm using.  Sometimes it goes into an infinite loop and takes up lots 
of CPU while it's just sitting there.

How might I set up a timeout for it?  I'd like to make a shell-script 
wrapper that kills the program if it takes too long.  I could do:

#!/bin/sh

wvware $* &
PID=$!

sleep 2
kill -9 $PID


But that's kind of lame.  The program won't return as fast as it 
usually can, if IO is done through stdin/stdout it would get all messed 
up, etc.  Is there an easier/better way?

   Ian