coreutils timeout does nothing

[Andrew Chi]

On Ubuntu 12.10, coreutils /usr/bin/timeout seems to do nothing. This is coreutils 8.13-3.2ubuntu2.

$ time /usr/bin/timeout 1 sleep 4 # should kill after 1 second

real 0m4.007s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

$ /usr/bin/timeout --version
timeout (GNU coreutils) 8.13
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Pádraig Brady.

[Julian Taylor (jtaylor)]

I can't reproduce the issue on 12.10 amd64 and i386

time /usr/bin/timeout 1 sleep 4 # should kill after 1 second

real 0m1.027s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

[Andrew Chi (chi-andrew)]

Unfortunately, after a reboot, I can no longer reproduce this either. I
was running Ubuntu 12.10 i386 as the guest OS in VirtualBox 4.2.4, with a
32-bit Windows 7 host (Intel Core i7 Q 720).

$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 3.5.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 19 10:27:31 UTC 2012
i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux

You can close the bug unless there's some reason to believe we can
reproduce the error.

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Julian Taylor <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> I can't reproduce the issue on 12.10 amd64 and i386
>
> time /usr/bin/timeout 1 sleep 4 # should kill after 1 second
>
> real 0m1.027s
> user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.000s
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1079889
>
> Title:
> coreutils timeout does nothing
>
> Status in “coreutils” package in Ubuntu:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> On Ubuntu 12.10, coreutils /usr/bin/timeout seems to do nothing. This
> is coreutils 8.13-3.2ubuntu2.
>
> $ time /usr/bin/timeout 1 sleep 4 # should kill after 1 second
>
> real 0m4.007s
> user 0m0.000s
> sys 0m0.000s
>
> $ /usr/bin/timeout --version
> timeout (GNU coreutils) 8.13
> Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <
> http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
> There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
>
> Written by Pádraig Brady.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/1079889/+subscriptions
>

[Andrew Chi (chi-andrew)]

Strange. I couldn't reproduce this two days ago, but I can reproduce it
again today on both Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (both virtualized as
stated in the previous message). Perhaps there's a race condition.

[Andrew Chi (chi-andrew)]

I tried to build coreutils-8.13 from source and ./configure seems to hang on "checking for working nanosleep..."
This might turn out to be a problem with virtualbox guest additions (i.e., kernel modules).
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=45395