cron

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, dan moylan wrote:
> fr: "jerry feldman" <gaf at blu.org>
> >> What about at. If you can use at, you can cheat and
> >> have your at script schedule another at.
>
> >dan moylan wrote
> >> my web hosting service, pair.com, has recently taken away cron
> >> privleges from their cheapest accounts (like mine).  i had been
> >> using cron to update a posted calendar so as always to point to
> >> the next pending event.  is there some other function which could
> >> be used to accomplish cron-like functionality?  they are running
> >> open bsd.
>
> unfortunately the bums have shut down at as well.

Oh yeah.  That eats up a lot of system resources.  NOT!!! Unless they're
doing it for security reasons.  To do damage you have to be logged on at
the time.

> btw, do background jobs stay running after one logs out?  perhaps
> i could run a script with a sleep loop?  would that work?

Normally, yes.  There is a command called "nohup" which will disassociate
a program from teh tty and make it ignore the HANGUP signal, so it will
continue to run after you've logged out.  You could set up a program to do
a sleep 60 ; theworkyouwantdone; in a loop, and run it nohup.

Another option, if you have CGI or PHP access, is to make your task a CGI
script and call it occasionally using lynx from a system that DOES have
cron.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD
DKK D  Imagine an alternate history where William S. Burroughs was
DK KD  actually interested in mainframe hardware design.
DDDD                                                     Bob Bruhin

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