> Michael, >
> Can you tell us how you plan to use this information. In other words
"why
> do you care about when the last write took place?" >
> Miron
Sure, professor: in some scenarios the only reasonable
course of action is to keep trying until the bitter, bitter end. And so
if timing out is not an option, then one doesn't put a timeout function into
the code in the first place.
The trick is detecting the asymptote as early as possible
to minimize badput time.
And so if a log file is supposed to have data written
to it for each time slice, for example, and nothing has appeared
in it for far longer than you'd expect a single time slice ought to take, then
you can conclude that you're not going to make any further forward progress
and some action should be taken. Since the job won't terminate itself for
reasons, it falls to a periodic_hold or _remove _expression_ which can use
that last-write time number compared to CurrentTime in order to trigger, imposing
an external timeout.
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