How to kill a thread that times out

Hi everybody ,

I am trying to implement a test director that will test a program. I also need to timeout if the program takes too long to output the answer.
So i am using a thread to keep testing the program ( sequentially , I.e. 1 test at a time ) I am unsure how to find out if the thread is taking too long with timeout value ( in seconds )
then I want to kill that thread ? how do I do that ?

here is my code
int success;
success = pthread_create(&thread1, NULL, runSlider, (Void *) filename) ;

void * runSlider(void * filename)
{
char s[100]= "./slide <";
strcat (s, (char *)filename);
system(s);
pthread_exit(NULL);

}

so I if this thread takes longer than a specified timeout I want to kill it . How do I do that ? I want to keep my main program somehow running the counter for the timeout and the thread to execute the system command.
Any ideas will be very appreciated

Thank you