On 12/28/07, Christopher Beland <beland(a)alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Wouldn't a cronjob give the same effect?
If you have a script that runs, say, on the hour, one benefit of doing a
loop instead of a cron job is that if your main script unexpectedly
fails to exit, or takes longer than an hour to execute, you don't end up
creating a large number of copies of the same script on the machine.
You can also add a simple check at the beginning looking for duplicate
copies running on the same machine, and take appropriate action
(either dying, or killing it, whichever you prefer). There's not much
need to reinvent cron, either way.