Keith Clarke wrote: > Please can anyone steer me towards the dictionary keyword equivalent > to ‘cron' jobs for initiating time-based background functions, along > the lines of… > > on TimeAt pHour pMinute pSecond > do stuff > end TimeAt
You can do it with LC, but not as a CGI, as LC Server is most commonly used. CGIs boot a scripting engine, the engine processes the request, sends a reply, and dies, each time it's called. Keeps things simple and discrete, but isn't well suited for an always-on process like a cron substitute.
Shared hosts generally don't allow always-on processes, but if you're running on a VPS or dedicated box you have the freedom to do anything you want. For such cases "send <msg> in <time>" works well, if you set up the process to boot with the machine and build a means of interacting with it while it's running.
If you've seen LiveNet you've seen it in action: I have a box in the corner of my office that aggregates RSS feeds for our community and packages them up and posts the result to a public server for display in LiveNet. It's been running every few minutes without interruption for years.
But I did it only because it was a fun exercise at the time, and if I had to do it over again I'd just use cron - simpler, leaner, more portable.
FWIW, cron is for periodic tasks. If you need a one-off at a specific time see at.
But can be managed from the command line, which means you can drive them from LC if needed through the shell function.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ [email protected] http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
