Prevent a certain program from running too long in bash

Update - I opensourced this script here: bash kira

I came up this this script to kill certain programs after they run for too long. This works like similar to a timeout. Warning this script is pretty harsh and kills the program.

#!/bin/bash
PROGRAM=replace-with-program-name
PIDSFILE=/tmp/kill-these.pids

for pid in `pidof $PROGRAM`
  do
    if grep -q $pid $PIDSFILE
      then
        kill $pid
    fi
  done

> $PIDSFILE

for pid in `pidof $PROGRAM`
  do
    echo $pid >> $PIDSFILE
  done

Then I wrote a cronjob to kill hung programs:

* * * * * /usr/local/sbin/killprogs.sh