run4 is a tool which is so useful, I’m surprised that no one had written it yet
(that I could find). run4 runs any command for only a specified period of
time.
Since it is only a 150 line C file, I didn’t bother to go the whole makefile
route. Simply gcc run4.c -o run4 and do with it whatever you like :)
# see the usage
run4 -h
# run tshark for only half an hour and stop
run4 30 minutes 'tshark -i eth0 -w sniff.pcap'
# run ping for a minute
run4 1 minutes 'ping google.com'
As you can see from the examples above, I needed something for testing networks
which would run for a while and then stop. Simply sending a packet count (the
-c option) to these tools was insufficient for my purposes.
I hope others will find it as useful as I have.