Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a script that run every 10 minutes, from a specific timeframe of the day, for example 0500 - 1900.

The script is some sort of checker script for an application log file and check for errors and email us if there is error/s reported in the log.

At the moment, I schedule it to start as a cron at 0500, then inside the script I check for whether the hour is less than 1900 and if it is then I continue running the script. In between checks, I have a sleep 600 = 10 minutes. I want to know if this is the most efficientway of running the script.

I've found some information on fork/spawn and daemon, while they sound like 'cool' terminology I don't really know the concept on whether they apply to what I want for the script.

Does having the script to be able to run within specific timeframe qualify it to be some sort of a daemon?

Anyway, I know one of the resident gurus will be able to shed some light on my over-analyzing what I am wanting to do.

Thanks in advance.

You can schedule it every 10 minutes with cron. Example crontab entry :
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /path/to_my_script.sh >> /path/to/logfile

This avoids one problem with sleep. Creep. Over the period of several months due to the way the scheduler works on a busy system, sleep 600 is guaranteed to sleep AT LEAST 600 seconds, but it could be more like 600.1 seconds. The start time of the script eases forward every day. Could end up starting several seconds late.

cron does not have this problem.

If this is a non-issue for you go with your sleep solution. That way you can check if it is running with

Code:

ps -ef | grep [script filename goes here]

Otherwise you would have to look at a log file or employ some other less convenient method than ps.