Shell Programming and Scripting

Slight difference with cron running a script and having x cron jobs is that the latter will run all the jobs simultaneously while the former has them being run sequentially. My guess is that these are fairly low resource jobs and will complete very quickly, so the distinction may be minimal.

Here is an idea for the contents of this script file.

/path/to/script

Code:

SKIP_COUNTRIES="gb mx"
ALL_COUNTRIES="us mx gb cn ge"

. /u/data/environment
export ENV=prod

for COUNTRY in ${ALL_COUNTRIES}
do
    for SKIP in ${SKIP_COUNTRIES}
    do
        [ ${COUNTRY} = "${SKIP}" ] && continue 2
    done
    /u/application/pkms/startStoppry.sh ${COUNTRY} kreight v1 monitor >> /u/application/grpms/${COUNTRY}/logs/kreight/v1/startkreight.out 2>&1
done

You can then either use vi to update the SKIP_COUNTRIES setting, or write an automated update using sed (or whatever) SKIP_COUNTRIES could even be read from a file, you have many options here...

At least for AIX it is easy: do the changes directly to the crontab (they are located in /var/spool/cron/crontab/<username>), find out crons PID and send a kill -1 <PID>. That will make it reread its configuration (as any UNIX program should act upon receiving signal 1).

If this is too fancy for your liking here is a more brutal approach: you can just kill cron. As it is started from /etc/inittab with the restart clause the system will restart it for you once it doesn't run any more.

I hope this helps.

bakunin