It' more likely a tips other than an article. Shows some ways to set timeout for a command on linux, thested on RHEL/SL/CentOS, should be ok for other linux distributions.

1. Set sleep time with the command, && condition

<command with options> & sleep 5 ; kill $!

For example, run

$ iostat 5 & sleep 2 ; kill $!
[1] 18332
Linux 2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64   03/25/2015     _x86_64_    (12 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          58.23   10.27    0.90    0.24    0.00   30.36

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
sdb              10.62       211.33      3830.55  634767300 11505700712
sda              11.46       222.77      3891.51  669132274 11688819718
dm-0             11.30       162.97        65.54  489518802  196862480
dm-1            953.35       260.20      7599.83  781550266 22827387016

[1]+  Terminated              iostat 5

$ echo $?
0

Note: the bad part of this implementation is that if the command takes large range of time, for example, 5 sec to 1 minutes, and you set timeout to 60 sec, then this implementation always takes 60s to finish.

2. use timeout

The GNU timeout provides the timeout solution:

 rpm -qf /usr/bin/timeout
coreutils-8.4-37.el6.x86_64

$timeout 5 command with options

$ timeout 2 iostat 5
Linux 2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64      03/25/2015     _x86_64_    (12 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          58.23   10.27    0.90    0.24    0.00   30.36

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
sdb              10.61       211.30      3830.07  634767300 11505711464
sda              11.46       222.74      3891.02  669132354 11688831830
dm-0             11.30       162.95        65.53  489518802  196865240
dm-1            953.23       260.17      7598.87  781550266 22827406144

$ echo $?
124

It returns 124 when timedout, otherwise returns the command return code.

3 Use Perl alarm

Use perl alarm feature, set alarm to 1 sec and run command sleep 10

perl -e "alarm 1; exec @ARGV" sleep 10
1427327073.25259
Alarm clock

$echo $?
142

Not, this solution doesn't work consistently with iostat I tested above, so far I have no idea about it, let me know if you find out.

4. Use expect command

Expect command on linux has timeout setting, so use it if you don't have GNU timeout on your machine

time_out=2
command="iostat 5"

$expect -c "set echo \"-noecho\"; set timeout $time_out; spawn -noecho $command; expect timeout { exit 1 } eof { exit 0 }"

Linux 2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64     03/25/2015     _x86_64_    (8 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          19.25    0.11    7.91    0.35    0.00   72.39

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn
sda               1.11         1.33        20.49    7920768  121880814
sdb               0.81         2.19        27.40   13000458  162985856
sdc               1.99       821.91        27.57 4888989830  163979688
sdd               1.70       821.50        27.57 4886563236  163979688
dm-0              2.59         1.33        20.48    7884378  121815312
dm-1              0.00         0.00         0.01      21000      52720
md1               3.24         1.30        25.79    7713298  153425384
dm-2              3.44         2.19        27.40   12998354  162985856

$echo $?
1