UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

To get into the nitty gritty of the "whys"...
Our job is scheduled via cron in a way, but actually runs based on a trigger file. The cron checks for certain conditions before it launches a session inside an ERP system. The job runs inside an ERP application and can hang at any given point and just not go anywhere, which means that everything appears to be "running" but its really not doing anything. The script itself will not end because it needs the application to end, which its not going to do. (no fix in sight so we have to deal with this)
There is really no way to deal with this except a reasonability check to see if the job has been "running" too long and notify support. There are some points along the process that are outside our control. (too much to go into).
I know this sounds hokey, but its the best we can do for this.
I'll try the different approaches for the time and see if they work for us. The "peak" hours that we are concerned about do not overlap days. That part is easy.

now that you have explained it a bit more. your looking for a realtime action to happen.

If your email funtion is at the base of the script but the script is stuck running in a hung state if you will; your script will never get to the notification funtion.

one line at a time till the end of the file.

A point brought up by my coworker. is.

After the file gets proccessed by your aplication does it dump back to disk? Does it disapear? what happens if an error happens?

You could set up a script that will check for files that have completed in x dir. if you dont see x file send an email. or vise versa.

any thoughts anyone?

Take another look at the script that I posted. It launches the real program in the background, and after 15 minutes, it checks to see if the background job is still running. This will reliably detect any instance of the background job running past the 15 minute deadline.

Yes. I caught that the job runs in the background on that script. Good idea - we need to see if we can do that with the application.
There is no output from the session as it is processing data into the ERP system to book sales orders, but that could also be an option.
We don't have consoles, we connect off PC workstations, thus, we mail ourselves the job status to our internet mail id. If its extremely urgent, we send a message to the support pager. During identified critical hours, this is one of the ones that will get sent to the pager.
Thanks for all the ideas.. keep them coming if you have any more.

Hi you,

I think my problem is very similar, so I posted my question here.
I want to measure the time my script runs. So that at the end of teh script I can tell the user the execution of the script demo took 11min 05 sec.

Now I stored the date of the execution and the endtime of the execution.
I just calculated the time like LivinFree in his script.

But the problem is, that if the script starts at 10:59:00 and ends at 11:01:00
I get as result a time of 42 minutes!!!

How can I solve this??

Or is there a better way to measure the time a acript takes within a script. I don't like to have two scripts, with one in the background...

THX

Ben Sky

If you are using ksh you can just use the SECONDS variable. It is the number of seconds that ksh has been running.

THX I did not know, that this variable exists, but I found it in the man page of ksh!! My fault....

And is there an easy way to convert than the seconds into minutes and secondes or just the way of calculating by dividing with 60?!

THX
Ben Sky