Thanks very much Eric & Jeff for your reply . Personally, I would recommend setting the SO_RECVTIMEO for GIT server sockets to a fixed default (eg. 5mins) , settable by a '--receive-timeout' argument or configuration parameter . The problem I was trying to overcome was cloning all the repositories under https://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/* . About 4 git clones would succeed in succession, but then typically the 5th would hang in read() forever - I left one such hung 'git clone' for nearly an hour and it had not progressed or timed out . I tried inserting a delay of up to 30 seconds between clones, but this did not help. Maybe freedesktop.org's GIT server is too overloaded and they have to resort to disabling 1 out of 5 GIT successive clone operations from same connection or something. Here is my solution, in case anyone else needs it : <quote><pre> eips=() counts=() declare -i failed=0; { echo "$BASHPID" >/tmp/git.pid; GIT_TRACE=2 exec git clone ${proto}://${user}anongit.freedesktop.org/${repo}$name; }& while [ ! -f /tmp/git.pid ]; do sleep 1; done git_pid="$(cat /tmp/git.pid)"; while [ -d /proc/$git_pid ]; do IFS=$'\n'; declare -a kids=($(ps --ppid $git_pid -o 'pid=,eip=')); unset IFS; declare -i n_kids=${#kids[@]} kid_n; for ((kid_n=0; kid_n < n_kids; kid_n+=1)); do declare -a ke=(${kids[kid_n]}); kid=${ke[0]} eip=${ke[1]} if [ ! -v 'eips['$kid']' ]; then eips[$kid]="$eip"; elif [ "${eips[$kid]}" = "$eip" ]; then if [ x = x"${counts[$kid]}" ]; then counts[$kid]=1; else counts[$kid]=$((${counts[$kid]}+1)); if (( ${counts[$kid]} >= 30 )); then echo 'child process '$kid' of git main process '$git_pid' appears to be stuck - killing it.'; kill -TERM $kid; ((failed=1)); fi fi else eips[$kid]="$eip"; counts[$kid]=''; fi done ; sleep 1; done wait </quote></pre> This is part of a script that reads a list of the Xorg projects, sets $repo to top level subdirectory, and $name to the project name, and initiates the GIT clone . It deems any GIT _CHILD_ process (eg. git-index-pack) that have not changed their instruction pointer register (EIP) for 30 seconds to be "hung" . There is logic at the end to retry all the failed clones. It does work, but is far from pretty . It sure would be nice if GIT had a timeout mechanism ! Thanks & Regards, Jason On 13/04/2016, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 10:49:19PM +0100, Jason Vas Dias wrote: > >> Is there any option I can specify to get the clone to timeout, or do I >> manually >> have to strace the git process and send it a signal after a hang is >> detected? > > Oh, one other thing you might consider, it something like "timeout" from > GNU coreutils, which puts a hard cap on the length of time a process can > run. > > It's totally unaware of the state of the process, though, so if you > really do have a clone which takes an hour, it might very well kill it > at 99% complete. It has no mechanism for "gee, this process looks like > it hasn't done anything for 5 minutes". > > I don't know offhand of a general tool for that. > > -Peff > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html