This solution kills the process tree in case of shell=True, passes parameters to the process (or not), has a timeout and gets the stdout, stderr and process output of the call back (it uses psutil for the kill_proc_tree). This was based on several solutions posted in SO including jcollado's. Posting in response to comments by Anson and jradice in jcollado's answer. Tested in Windows Srvr 2012 and Ubuntu 14.04. Please note that for Ubuntu you need to change the parent.children(...) call to parent.get_children(...).

def kill_proc_tree(pid, including_parent=True):
  parent = psutil.Process(pid)
  children = parent.children(recursive=True)
  for child in children:
    child.kill()
  psutil.wait_procs(children, timeout=5)
  if including_parent:
    parent.kill()
    parent.wait(5)

def run_with_timeout(cmd, current_dir, cmd_parms, timeout):
  def target():
    process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, cwd=current_dir, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

    # wait for the process to terminate
    if (cmd_parms == ""):
      out, err = process.communicate()
    else:
      out, err = process.communicate(cmd_parms)
    errcode = process.returncode

  thread = Thread(target=target)
  thread.start()

  thread.join(timeout)
  if thread.is_alive():
    me = os.getpid()
    kill_proc_tree(me, including_parent=False)
    thread.join()

另一种选择是写入临时文件以防止标准输出阻塞，而不需要使用communication()轮询。在其他答案没有的地方，这个方法对我有用;比如在窗户上。

    outFile =  tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile() 
    errFile =   tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile() 
    proc = subprocess.Popen(args, stderr=errFile, stdout=outFile, universal_newlines=False)
    wait_remaining_sec = timeout

    while proc.poll() is None and wait_remaining_sec > 0:
        time.sleep(1)
        wait_remaining_sec -= 1

    if wait_remaining_sec <= 0:
        killProc(proc.pid)
        raise ProcessIncompleteError(proc, timeout)

    # read temp streams from start
    outFile.seek(0);
    errFile.seek(0);
    out = outFile.read()
    err = errFile.read()
    outFile.close()
    errFile.close()

不幸的是，我的雇主在公开源代码方面有非常严格的规定，所以我不能提供实际的代码。但对我来说，最好的解决方案是创建一个子类重写Popen.wait()来轮询，而不是无限期地等待。__init__接受超时参数。一旦你这样做，所有其他Popen方法(调用等待)将按预期工作，包括通信。

timeout现在由子进程模块中的call()和communication()支持(从Python3.3开始):

import subprocess

subprocess.call("command", timeout=20, shell=True)

这将调用该命令并引发异常

subprocess.TimeoutExpired

如果命令在20秒后还没有完成。

然后你可以处理异常来继续你的代码，就像这样:

try:
    subprocess.call("command", timeout=20, shell=True)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
    # insert code here

希望这能有所帮助。

我添加了从jcollado线程到我的Python模块easyprocess的解决方案。

安装:

pip install easyprocess

例子:

from easyprocess import Proc

# shell is not supported!
stdout=Proc('ping localhost').call(timeout=1.5).stdout
print stdout

这是我的解决方案，我使用线程和事件:

import subprocess
from threading import Thread, Event

def kill_on_timeout(done, timeout, proc):
    if not done.wait(timeout):
        proc.kill()

def exec_command(command, timeout):

    done = Event()
    proc = subprocess.Popen(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

    watcher = Thread(target=kill_on_timeout, args=(done, timeout, proc))
    watcher.daemon = True
    watcher.start()

    data, stderr = proc.communicate()
    done.set()

    return data, stderr, proc.returncode

在行动:

In [2]: exec_command(['sleep', '10'], 5)
Out[2]: ('', '', -9)

In [3]: exec_command(['sleep', '10'], 11)
Out[3]: ('', '', 0)