How do i run something inside a bash script for a number of seconds?

[shoebill]

Man page for bash.

Also see: How do i obtain the number of seconds my shell has been running?

May you want to run a certain tasks inside a script for a predefined amount of time, one way is:

#!/bin/bash
run_time=$((SECONDS+10))

while [ $SECONDS -lt $run_time ]
do
uptime 
sleep 2
done

The result is run uptime every two seconds for no more than 10 seconds.