Hal sez:
Before I start throwing out ideas that I'm sure aren't new to readers here, I have a simple question that perhaps I should post to comp.unix.questions or comp.lang.perl, but.... Can I, and how would I, get a perl script to kick in and send out mail every few minutes when I am NOT logged in. Is this possible on Netcom?
Most public Unix systems will not let you do this, in my experience. The two Unix commands which usually give you the ability to run programs at regular intervals are "at" and "crontab". You can read the man pages and try running these to see if they are enabled for you.
If you run into this, there is a sneaky way to do it if you have a friend somewhere that doesn't restrict at or crontab and if your system provides elm and will will honor a .forward file. Have your friend set up a crontab that mails you a short note with some header characteristic that the filter program for elm can recognize via the filter-rules file and kick off an invocation of whatever you want to do each time it recieves one of these notes. Sneaky but it works. :-) Peace, Bob -- Bob Cain rcain@netcom.com 408-354-8021 "I used to be different. But now I'm the same." --------------PGP 1.0 or 2.0 public key available on request.------------------