Basic information about my system: I have a music system where people can schedule songs to start and end at a specific time.
OS: Arch linux
It sets two crons at the moment. One lets say at 1.50 (start time with a command like "play etc") and another set at 3.20 (end time with a command like "end etc").
My setup works perfectly and i can end delete schedules etc etc but i now noticed an issue! If i set the above times and turn the system off (My system is a raspberry pi) and turn back on at lets say 2.00 and i missed the 1.50 deadline, the music doesnt start (obviously) and i want to try make it so no matter what time i turn it on within a range lets say: 1.50 - 3.20 it will start the play command. But it will run the command once!
I looked around and the commands i got was like:
0 1.50-3.20/2 * * * your_command.sh
But thats to run every 2 hours. I want it to run once only between these times?
Thanks!
You could add an additional cron job which starts a script on every reboot. For instance, you could add a line like this to your crontab:
#reboot /home/pi/startplayback.sh
Your startplayback.sh script should check if current time is within the desired period and run the desired command if it is. For example the code below will print PLAY! if the script is run between 1:50 and 3:20. You could replace echo 'PLAY!' by run WHATEVER
#!/bin/bash
current=$(date '+%H%M')
(( current=(10#$current) ))
((current > 150 && current < 320 )) && echo 'PLAY!'
P.S. Don't forget to make your script executable sudo chmod +x startplayback.sh
You might want to look at the at command and its utilities.
SYNOPSIS
at [-q queue] [-f file] [-mldbv] time
at [-q queue] [-f file] [-mldbv] -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.SS]
at -c job [job ...]
at -l [job ...]
at -l -q queue
at -r job [job ...]
atq [-q queue] [-v]
atrm job [job ...]
batch [-q queue] [-f file] [-mv] [time]
at is good for scheduling one time jobs to be run at some point in the future. It maintains a queue of these jobs, so you can use it to schedule things with a great variety of different time specifications.
Cron is in my opinion a scheduler for jobs that are to be repeated over and over.
So a quick and dirty example for you:
echo 'ls -lathF' | at now + 1 minute
As expected you will see a job to be run in one minute. Try atq to see the list of jobs.
When the job is done, output will be mailed to your user by default.
I solved the issue by creating a PHP file and load the page on reboot then do its work and redirect back to such and such.
Related
I am having list of cron job functions.Each function run for certain period of time.Is there any way to find how long each cron function execute,Like time of start executing function and end time?
Expected output:
Cron tab start time: timestamp
cront tab end time: timestamp
Read crontab(5). A cron job is just a shell command or script. That shell could, for example, use logger(1) mixed with date(1) and time(1). See also time(7). See also GNU bash documentation.
A cron job could also be a GUILE script, or a Python one. See execve(2), fork(2) and other syscalls(2) which is called by crond
And cron is open source, so you are allowed to study its source code.... (e.g. of GNU mcron). Or use strace(1) on it to understand its behavior.
Consider reading Advanced Linux Programming and see Linux From Scratch.
For example, I am running thru cron a backup script starting with
#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME
renice -n +2 -p $$
ionice -c Best-effort -n +5 -p $$
tm=$(date +"backup-home+%Y-%b-%d-%Hh%M")
logger --id=$$ -t backup-home start $tm
sync
On my private network I have a backup server, which runs a bacula backup every night. To save energy I use a cron job to wake the server, but I haven't found out, how to properly shut it down after the backup is done.
By the means of the bacula-director configuration I can call a script during the processing of the last backup job (i.e. the backup of the file catalog). I tried to use this script:
#!/bin/bash
# shutdown server in 10 minutes
#
# ps, 17.11.2013
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
exit 0
The script shuts down the server - but apparently it returns just during the shutdown,
and as a consequence that last backup job hangs just until the shutdown. How can I make the script to file the shutdown and return immediately?
Update: After an extensive search I came up with a (albeit pretty ugly) solution:
The script run by bacula looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
at -f /root/scripts/shutdown_now.sh now + 10 minutes
And the second script (shutdown_now.sh) looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
shutdown -h now
Actually I found no obvious method to add the required parameters of shutdown in the syntax of the 'at' command. Maybe someone can give me some advice here.
Depending on your backup server’s OS, the implementation of shutdown might behave differently. I have tested the following two solutions on Ubuntu 12.04 and they both worked for me:
As the root user I have created a shell script with the following content and called it in a bash shell:
shutdown -h 10 &
exit 0
The exit code of the script in the shell was correct (tested with echo $?). The shutdown was still in progress (tested with shutdown -c).
This bash function call in a second shell script worked equally well:
my_shutdown() {
shutdown -h 10
}
my_shutdown &
exit 0
No need to create a second BASH script to run the shutdown command. Just replace the following line in your backup script:
bash -c "nohup /sbin/shutdown -h 10" &
with this:
echo "/sbin/poweroff" | /usr/bin/at now + 10 min >/dev/null 2>&1
Feel free to adjust the time interval to suit your preference.
If you can become root: either log in as, or sudo -i this works (tested on ubuntu 14.04):
# shutdown -h 20:00 & //halts the machine at 8pm
No shell script needed. I can then log out, and log back in, and the process is still there. Interestingly, if I tried this with sudo in the command line, then when I log out, the process does go away!
BTW, just to note, that I also use this command to do occasional reboots after everyone has gone home.
# shutdown -r 20:00 & //re-boots the machine at 8pm
I have seven licenses of a particular software. Therefore, I want to start 7 jobs simultaneously. I can do that using '&'. Now, 'wait' command waits till the end of all of those 7 processes to be finished to spawn the next 7. Now, I would like to write the shell script where after I start the first seven, as and when a job gets completed I would like to start another. This is because some of those 7 jobs might take very long while some others get over really quickly. I don't want to waste time waiting for all of them to finish. Is there a way to do this in linux? Could you please help me?
Thanks.
GNU parallel is the way to go. It is designed for launching multiples instances of a same command, each with a different argument retrieved either from stdin or an external file.
Let's say your licensed script is called myScript, each instance having the same options --arg1 --arg2 and taking a variable parameter --argVariable for each instance spawned, those parameters being stored in file myParameters :
cat myParameters | parallel -halt 1 --jobs 7 ./myScript --arg1 --argVariable {} --arg2
Explanations :
-halt 1 tells parallel to halt all jobs if one fails
--jobs 7 will launch 7 instances of myScript
On a debian-based linux system, you can install parallel using :
sudo apt-get install parallel
As a bonus, if your licenses allow it, you can even tell parallel to launch these 7 instances amongst multiple computers.
You could check how many are currently running and start more if you have less than 7:
while true; do
if [ "`ps ax -o comm | grep process-name | wc -l`" -lt 7 ]; then
process-name &
fi
sleep 1
done
Write two scripts. One which restarts a job everytime it is finished and one that starts 7 times the first script.
Like:
script1:
./script2 job1
...
./script2 job7
and
script2:
while(...)
./jobX
I found a fairly good solution using make, which is a part of the standard distributions. See here
I want to run a cron job every minute that will launch a script. Simple enough there. However, I need to make sure that not more than X number (defined in the script) of instances are ever running. These are queue workers, so if at any minute interval 6 workers are still active, then I would not launch another instance. The script simply launches a PHP script which exits if no job available. Right now I have a shell script that perpetually launches itself every 10 seconds after exit... but there are long periods of time where there are no jobs, and a minute delay is fine. Eventually I would like to have two cron jobs for peak and off-peak, with different intervals.
Make sure you have unique script name.
Then check if 6 instances are already running
if [ $(pgrep '^UNIQUE_SCIPT_NAME$' -c) -lt 6 ]
then
# start my script
else
# do not start my script
fi
I'd say that if you want to iterate as often as every minute, then a process like your current shell script that relaunches itself is what you actually want to do. Just increase the delay from 10 seconds to a minute.
That way, you can also more easily control your delay for peak and off-peak, as you wanted. It would be rather elegant to simply use a shorter delay if the script found something to do the last time it was launched, or a longer delay if it did not find anything.
You could use a script like OneAtATime to guard against multiple simultaneous executions.
This is what i am using in my shell scripts:
echo -n "Checking if job is already running... "
me=`basename $0`
running=$(ps aux | grep ${me} | grep -v .log | grep -v grep | wc -l)
if [ $running -gt 1 ];
then
echo "already running, stopping job"
exit 1
else
echo "OK."
fi;
The command you're looking for is in line 3. Just replace $(me) with your php script name. In case you're wondering about the grep .log part: I'm piping the output into a log file, whose name partially contains the script name, so this way i'm avoiding it to be double-counted.
I want to create a script that, after knowing that my machine has been turned on for at least 7h, it does something.
Is this possible? Is there a system variable or something like that that shows me the last time the machine was turned on?
The following command placed in /etc/rc.local:
echo 'touch /tmp/test' | at -t $(date -d "+7 hours" +%m%d%H%M)
will create a job that will run a touch /tmp/test in seven hours.
To protect against frequent reboots and prevent adding multiple jobs you could use one at queue exclusively for this type of jobs (e.g. c queue). Adding -q c to the list of at parameters will place the job in the c queue. Before adding new job you can delete all jobs from c queue:
for job in $(atq -q c | sed 's/[ \t].*//'); do atrm $job; done
You can parse the output of uptime I suppose.
As Pavel and thkala point out below, this is not a robust solution. See their comments!
The uptime command shows you how long the system has been running.
To accomplish your task, you can make a script that first does sleep 25200 (25200 seconds = 7 hours), and then does something useful. Have this script run at startup, for example by adding it to /etc/rc.local. This is a better idea than polling the uptime command to see if the machine has been up for 7 hours (which is comparable to a kid in the backseat of a car asking "are we there yet?" :-))
Just wait for uptime to equal seven hours.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/uptime
I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but uptime command will give you for how many computer was running since last reboot.
$ cut -d ' ' -f 1 </proc/uptime
This will give you the current system uptime in seconds, in floating point format.
The following could be used in a bash script:
if [[ "$(cut -d . -f 1 </proc/uptime)" -gt "$(($HOURS * 3600))" ]]; then
...
fi
Add the following to your crontab:
#reboot sleep 7h; /path/to/job
Either /etc/crontab, /etc/cron.d/, or your users crontab, depending on whether you want to run it as root or the user -- don't forget to put "root" after "#reboot" if you put it in /etc/crontab or cron.d
This has the benefit that if you reboot multiple times, the jobs get cancelled at shut down, so you won't get a bunch of them stacking up if you reboot several times within 7 hours. The "#reboot" time specification triggers the job to be run once when the system is rebooted. "sleep 7h;" waits for 7 hours before running "/path/to/job".