shell scripting, how to auto-timeout?

[Nerius Landys]

Actually, because of the "exec" in the parent script, the line below
it, the "killing terminator process" line, never gets reached.  So the
terminator process that waits to kill its parent always waits the full
5 seconds in the background.  If I pipe the output of the parent
script through less, it waits 5 seconds before it reaches the end of
the output.  That is annoying.  Is there any way to solve that?