I'm generally not a huge fan of inlining the command or cluttering up my local directory with little scripts to get around the fact that it must be a subprocess

I'm generally not a huge fan of inlining the command or cluttering up my local directory with little scripts to get around the fact that it must be a subprocess you can send a signal to. I use a wrapper like this, which exports a function containing whatever complex logic I want to time out. The funky quoting in the timeout bash -c argument is a generalized version of what aidenn0 mentioned in another comment here (passing in args safely to subproc). #!/usr/bin/env bash long_fn () { # this can contain anything, like OPs until curl loop sleep $1 } # to TIMEOUT_DURATION BASH_FN_NAME BASH_FN_ARGS... to () { local duration="$1"; shift local fn_name="$1"; shift export -f "$fn_name" timeout "$duration" bash -c "$fn_name"' "$@"' _ $@ } time to 1s long_fn 5 # will report it ran 1 second