Force wget to timeout

Easiest way is to use the timeout(1) command, part of GNU coreutils, so available pretty much anywhere bash is installed:

timeout 60 wget ..various wget args..

or if you want to hard-kill wget if its running too long:

timeout -s KILL 60 wget ..various wget args..

You can run the wget command as a background process and send a SIGKILL to forcibly kill it after sleeping for a certain amount of time.

wget ... &
wget_pid=$!
counter=0
timeout=60
while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]]
do
    sleep 1
    counter=$(($counter+1))
done
if [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") ]]; then
    kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid"
fi

Explanation:

• wget ... & - the & notation at the end runs the command in the background as opposed to the foreground
• wget_pid=$! - $! is a special shell variable that contains the process id of the most recently executed command. Here we save it to a variable called wget_pid.
• while [[ -n $(ps -e) | grep "$wget_pid") && "$counter" -lt "$timeout" ]] - Look for the process every one second, if it's still there, keep waiting until a timeout limit.
• kill -s SIGKILL "$wget_pid" - We use kill to forcibly kill the wget process running in the background by sending it a SIGKILL signal.