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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Script that will look the same as Cron Post 303037672 by drysdalk on Friday 9th of August 2019 09:29:08 AM
Old 08-09-2019
Hi,

If you definitely don't have access to the crontab for the user you want to run the script as, and if you can't get the person who has root on the box in question to set it up for you, then one approach would be to have a script that runs in an infinite loop until a target time arrives, and then runs whatever task it's meant to run at that time.

Here's an example of such a script, showing the code and me starting to run it roughly ten seconds before the appointed time:

Code:
$ cat script.sh 
#!/bin/bash

runtime=`/usr/bin/date -d '2019-08-09 14:22:00' +%s`

while true
do
        nowtime=`/usr/bin/date +%s`

        if [ "$runtime" == "$nowtime" ]
        then
                date
                echo "It's time to run"
                exit 0
        else
                date
                echo "It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting"
        fi

        /usr/bin/sleep 1
done

$ ./script.sh 
Fri Aug  9 14:21:50 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:51 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:52 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:53 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:54 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:55 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:56 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:57 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:58 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:21:59 BST 2019
It's not time to run, I'll keep waiting
Fri Aug  9 14:22:00 BST 2019
It's time to run
$

So the basic idea is we define our target time in the runtime variable at the top, converting a human-readable date into the UNIX epoch (the number of seconds since the start of 1970). We then in an infinite loop check the current time, compare it to our target time, and do something specific if the two match. If the current time is not the target time, we wait one second, and the loop goes round again until the target time arrives.

Note that this isn't entirely ideal, and you'd need to run this via screen or tmux or something similar to ensure that the script didn't die when your terminal session did. But if you really definitely don't have access to an actual system-level task scheduler, this kind of approach will work in a pinch. You might also want to make the sleep command wait for less than one second, just to be sure you don't ever miss the target second you want your job to actually run, but that's the only other issue that immediately comes to mind.

Hope this helps !
 

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CRONTAB(1)							   User Commands							CRONTAB(1)

NAME
crontab - maintains crontab files for individual users SYNOPSIS
crontab [-u user] file crontab [-u user] [-l | -r | -e] [-i] [-s] crontab -n [ hostname ] crontab -c DESCRIPTION
Crontab is the program used to install, remove or list the tables used to serve the cron(8) daemon. Each user can have their own crontab, and though these are files in /var/spool/, they are not intended to be edited directly. For SELinux in MLS mode, you can define more crontabs for each range. For more information, see selinux(8). In this version of Cron it is possible to use a network-mounted shared /var/spool/cron across a cluster of hosts and specify that only one of the hosts should run the crontab jobs in the particular directory at any one time. You may also use crontab(1) from any of these hosts to edit the same shared set of crontab files, and to set and query which host should run the crontab jobs. Running cron jobs can be allowed or disallowed for different users. For this purpose, use the cron.allow and cron.deny files. If the cron.allow file exists, a user must be listed in it to be allowed to use cron If the cron.allow file does not exist but the cron.deny file does exist, then a user must not be listed in the cron.deny file in order to use cron. If neither of these files exists, only the super user is allowed to use cron. Another way to restrict access to cron is to use PAM authentication in /etc/security/access.conf to set up users, which are allowed or disallowed to use crontab or modify system cron jobs in the /etc/cron.d/ directory. The temporary directory can be set in an environment variable. If it is not set by the user, the /tmp directory is used. OPTIONS
-u Appends the name of the user whose crontab is to be modified. If this option is not used, crontab examines "your" crontab, i.e., the crontab of the person executing the command. Note that su(8) may confuse crontab, thus, when executing commands under su(8) you should always use the -u option. If no crontab exists for a particular user, it is created for him the first time the crontab -u command is used under his username. -l Displays the current crontab on standard output. -r Removes the current crontab. -e Edits the current crontab using the editor specified by the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables. After you exit from the editor, the modified crontab will be installed automatically. -i This option modifies the -r option to prompt the user for a 'y/Y' response before actually removing the crontab. -s Appends the current SELinux security context string as an MLS_LEVEL setting to the crontab file before editing / replacement occurs - see the documentation of MLS_LEVEL in crontab(5). -n This option is relevant only if cron(8) was started with the -c option, to enable clustering support. It is used to set the host in the cluster which should run the jobs specified in the crontab files in the /var/spool/cron directory. If a hostname is supplied, the host whose hostname returned by gethostname(2) matches the supplied hostname, will be selected to run the selected cron jobs subsequently. If there is no host in the cluster matching the supplied hostname, or you explicitly specify an empty hostname, then the selected jobs will not be run at all. If the hostname is omitted, the name of the local host returned by gethostname(2) is used. Using this option has no effect on the /etc/crontab file and the files in the /etc/cron.d directory, which are always run, and considered host-specific. For more information on clustering support, see cron(8). -c This option is only relevant if cron(8) was started with the -c option, to enable clustering support. It is used to query which host in the cluster is currently set to run the jobs specified in the crontab files in the directory /var/spool/cron , as set using the -n option. SEE ALSO
crontab(5), cron(8) FILES
/etc/cron.allow /etc/cron.deny STANDARDS
The crontab command conforms to IEEE Std1003.2-1992 (``POSIX''). This new command syntax differs from previous versions of Vixie Cron, as well as from the classic SVR3 syntax. DIAGNOSTICS
An informative usage message appears if you run a crontab with a faulty command defined in it. AUTHOR
Paul Vixie <vixie@isc.org> Colin Dean <colin@colin-dean.org> cronie 2012-11-22 CRONTAB(1)
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