UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hi guys
i want my cron to execute for every minute

Jobs run by cron are not interactive; they don't have a connection to your keyboard.

I would suggest using at instead of cron. Use a file to keep track of how many times the job has run. When the job is ready to exit, it can update the count of how many time it has run, and if it needs to run again, have it use something like:

Code:

at now + 20 minutes <<EOF
command_name arg...
EOF

Of course, instead of using a file to save the count of how many times it has run, the number of times to run the script could be one of the arguments passed to the script.

how can the same be done in cron ??any suggestion!

how about writing in my script to check the count and just execute my cron

You have it a little bit backwards. You don't execute cron; cron executes your script. You don't want to stop cron (which would suspend other cron jobs for you and every other user on your system); you want the script cron runs for you to decide that it should exit rather than do what it designed to do.

Of course you can have your script (which will be executed by cron every 20 minutes [or whatever schedule you set using crontab]) verify that some kind of counter indicates that it should continue processing. If it should continue; it can update the counter and do whatever you want it to do. If it should not continue, it can just exit.

There will still be no way for your script to interactively ask whether or not it should continue after the desired count has been reached.