anti-hang

[Mark Richards]

I use dropbear client, connecting to an openssh server.  dbclient will 
provide connection services in a remote unattended client, and therefore 
under no circumstances can the connection hang.  In testing, I found 
that there are instances where the client is expecting user input.  For 
example, if the server is not in known_hosts, dbclient asks to accept 
the connection.  In another instance, sending a bad key caused the 
connection attempt to hang (forever, it seemed).

dropbear client has -K which is nice, but what's needed sometimes is -D 
("die after").  eg:

   dbclient -i /path/to/key -D 30 me at ip

dbclient will return an exit code after 30 seconds if nothing transpires.

Is there such a feature or a way to work around?