Terminate download after command-line supplied duration

[Anonymouslemming]

Looking through the documentation, I can't see a way to download a stream for a specific number of seconds.
This would be useful when downloading from audio services like tunein where the stream does not end at the end of the programme.
At the moment, I'm working around this by calling youtube-dl from a script and killing the background PID after a certain amount of time:

(/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl -q --no-part -o "${OUTFILE}" ${URL}) & DLPID=$!
sleep $DURATION
kill ${DLPID}

Having a --duration flag and terminating after this time would be quite useful for cases like this.

[nagisa]

There’s a timeout command from coreutils (= available on most unixes), which you can use like this:

timeout {timeout args} {timeout duration} youtube-dl {youtube-dl args}

[repomaa]

another thing worth mentioning is that this needs the --no-part option to work.

[arendtio]

Today, I tried both solutions with version 2018.06.14. @Anonymouslemming your solution doesn't seem to kill the ffmpeg background process which keeps recording even after the script exited (hidden by the -q flag). I don't know why it happens but I had a similar solution myself and that problem brought me here ;-)

@nagisa the timeout solution works great and also cleans up the ffmpeg process 👍 The only downside seems to be, that timeout exists with a non-zero status in case of an timeout (relevant when you use it within a script with set -e).

--no-part worked as I expected it.