Start and control an extern program

[Noah]

Axel Koehler <axel.koehler at tu-berlin.de> wrote in message news:<kpd67jfdk4.fsf at rosebud.gp.tu-berlin.de>...
> Hallo, 
> I want to start an extern program  and simple stop it, after a
> given time, if not succesfull finished.  
> OS is Linux
> Axel

You could try the Pexpect library.
    http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/
It allows you to start an external program and then wait for a given result 
with a given timeout. Pexpect has a default timeout of 30 seconds, but 
you can change that. The result that you are looking for can be 
any string that you expect in the output. The string can be a 
regular expression pattern. So you could write code like this:

import pexpect
child = pexpect.spawn ('my_external_program', timeout=120) # Two minute timeout.
index = p.expect (['results_you_are_looking_for', pexpect.TIMEOUT])
if index == 0:
    do_something ()
elif index == 1:
    child.kill (9)
    child.close ()

Yours,
Noah