Handling timeouts

[krystof-k]

Hey there, I need to implement timeout for a long running Tesseract command.

I came up with two options how to do it:

1. Add the timeout option to the RTesseract.new and reimplement the Command#run using the Open3.popen3 instead of Open3.capture3 and catch the timout there (if set)
2. Add some async option to the RTesseract.new and implement some run_async and results methods, also using Open3.popen3, which would return PID therefore the timeout (killing the process) can be handled in the client code.

What do you think? Should I try to open a PR? Thanks!

[krystof-k]

Just posting a workaround until this moves on, if anyone finds it useful.

Simply create a shell script wrapper around tesseract command:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

timeout 10s tesseract "$@"

And then use it when calling RTesseract:

RTesseract.new("image.jpeg", command: "./tesseract_with_timeout.sh").to_s

Unfortunately you cannot tell whether it timed out or it crashed:

begin
  RTesseract.new("image.jpeg", command: "./tesseract_with_timeout.sh").to_s
rescue RTesseract::Error => e
  raise e unless e.message.include?("Terminated")
  raise "Tesseract probably timed out"
end

So it would be still much better to handle it directly in the gem as proposed above.