Today I had to run a script for a limited amount of time before asking it to
terminate. I came across a really handy command line tool already available with
the GNU/Linux - timeout.
Running a command for a fixed time is as easy as this:
timeout 5s scrapy crawl
$ timeout --help
Usage: timeout [OPTION] DURATION COMMAND [ARG]...
or: timeout [OPTION]
Start COMMAND, and kill it if still running after DURATION.
Happy hacking!