Re: Running regularly
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.
I had an idea for how to get around this, so that people could run batching remailers which sent out mail, say, every 30 minutes or whatever. (Unlike Xenon, I am of a generation which is accustomed to waiting more than a few seconds for mail to travel across the country!) The idea was simply for someone who DID have an account which would let them use at or cron, to run a program which would simply send a "ding" message (not to be confused with a "ping" message :) at regular intervals to a list of subscribers. This message could have a special header field so that the remailer programs could easily recognize it and take whatever action they wanted, like running Karl Barrus' script to scan a directory for pending outgoing remailer mail and send it out. (Karl has had batching running for months, as well as postage-stamp-based remailers (albeit with non-anonymous stamps). He is way ahead of most of this discussion.)
Hal
Perhaps this is too rudimentary ..... Why not make two shell scripts, one that sleeps for so long (say 20 minutes) using the unix sleep command, and then calls the remailer scripts in an infinite while loop. This would work if you set it up as a background process,and you don't need to be root for it to work. Only downsides are that when the machine crashes you have to log back in and restart script, your sleep command will always be in the top window if your sys-admin is watching, and you have to be careful not to spawn to many processes and bring the system down. Matt
Matthew Bernardini <matthew@gandalf.rutgers.edu> wrote:
Why not make two shell scripts, one that sleeps for so long (say 20 minutes) using the unix sleep command, and then calls the remailer scripts in an infinite while loop. This would work if you set it up as a background process,and you don't need to be root for it to work. Only downsides are that when the machine crashes you have to log back in and restart script, your sleep command will always be in the top window if your sys-admin is watching, and you have to be careful not to spawn to many processes and bring the system down.
I tried this on the system here, but it killed off the process when I logged off. As for starting too many processes, just don't start them... leave it as one single process that just repeats itself indefinently with sleeps in between.
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 1994 14:27:46 -0500 (EST) From: Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu> Matthew Bernardini <matthew@gandalf.rutgers.edu> wrote:
Why not make two shell scripts, one that sleeps for so long (say 20 minutes) using the unix sleep command, and then calls the remailer scripts in an infinite while loop. This would work if you set it up as a background process,and you don't need to be root for it to work.
I tried this on the system here, but it killed off the process when I logged off. If it's a UNIX system, try using the ``nohup'' (for ``no-hang-up'', from the days when you connected to computers by telephone) command to keep your background process alive after you log out.
Matthew Bernardini <matthew@gandalf.rutgers.edu> wrote:
Why not make two shell scripts, one that sleeps for so long (say 20 minutes) using the unix sleep command, and then calls the remailer scripts in an infinite while loop. This would work if you set it up as a background
...
I tried this on the system here, but it killed off the process when I logged off.
As for starting too many processes, just don't start them... leave it as one single process that just repeats itself indefinently with sleeps in between.
You did try to nohup it, right? nohup script blabla... sdw -- Stephen D. Williams Local Internet Gateway Co.; SDW Systems 513 496-5223APager LIG dev./sales Internet: sdw@lig.net sdw@meaddata.com OO R&D Source Dist. By Horse: 2464 Rosina Dr., Miamisburg, OH 45342-6430 Comm. Consulting ICBM: 39 34N 85 15W I love it when a plan comes together
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