How to timeout a program after x amount of time

I'm setting up a system where I need the program to terminate itself after 10 seconds. I'm using rednet api, when the signal is not sent it's just stuck waiting for it to come by. But I want it to stop listening for that protocol and reboot the computer after 10 seconds. With rednet I can't just put senderID, message = rednet.receive("protocol",10) because that would run all the other lines of code after it, which is not what I want. Little help?…

If you pass a timeout to rednet.receive and it doesn't get any messages it will return nil, meaning you can check if it timeout:

local id, message = rednet.receive(5)

if id then --# if id is not nil or false
  --# we got a message!
else
  --# no message, rednet.receive timeout
end

Thanks!