Hi, I'm working on a cron like functionality for my application. The outer loops runs continuously waking every x seconds (say x=180, 300, ..). It needs to know what events in cron has expired and for each event do the work needed.
It's basically like unix cron or like a calendar application with some restrictions. The outer loop may come back a lot later and many events might have missed their schedule -- but this is okay.. We don't have to worry about missed events (if there were n misses, we just need to execute call back once). Let's take some examples [Let e denotes an event] e1: hour=1 min=30 # Run every day once at 1:30 AM e2: wday=0, hour=1 min=0 # run every Monday at 1 AM e3: month=10, day=10, hour=10 min=0 # run on October 10th, 10 AM every year class Cron_Event (object): def __init__ (year=None, month=None, day=None, hour=None ..etc) # do init class Cron (object): def __init__ (): # do init def event_add (e): # add an event def execute() # see if any events has "expired" .. call it's callback # I'm looking for ideas on how to manage the events here >From outer loop cron = Cron() # create various events like e1 = Cron_Event(hour=1) cron.event_add(e1) e2 = Cron_Event(wday=0, hour=1) cron.event_add(e2) while True: sleep x seconds (or wait until woken up) cron.execute() # do other work.. x may change here If I can restrict to hour and minute, it seems manageable as the interval between two occurrences is a constant. But allowing days like every Monday or 1st of every month makes things complicated. Moreover I would like each constraint in e to take on multiple possibilities (like every day at 1AM, 2 AM and 4 AM do this). I'm looking for solutions that can leverage datetime.datetime routines. My current ideas include for each e, track the next time it will fire (in seconds since epoch as given by time.time()). Once current time has passed that time, we execute the event. e.g. >>> datetime.datetime.now() datetime.datetime(2008, 8, 22, 13, 19, 54, 5567) >>> time.time() 1219436401.741966 <--- compute event's next firing in a format like this >>> The problem seems to be how to compute that future point in time (in seconds since epoch) for a generic Cron_Event. Say how do I know the exact time in future that will satisfy a constraint like: month=11, wday=1, hour=3, min=30 # At 3:30 AM on a Tuesday in November Thanks for your thoughts. Karthik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list