HI All,
I wana set a cron to run a script every second. Please reply back if any one knows how to do this.

Thanks & regards,

Hi,

The minimum timeframe in cron is 1 minute, most cron daemons check every 30 seconds to see if anything needs to be done.

You don't tell what the script does, but isn't it possible to make a loop in the script itseelf (use sleep 1 to pause one second). Loop 59 times. This way you can strat the script every minute (or 5 minutes if you increase the loop.

Hope this helps.

the reply describing a polling of 60 or 30 seconds by cron is contradicting,

based on the entries - cron entries
job list is constructed
and depending on the time-set for next job, timer is set to wake the cron
if cron entries are edited, job list is rebuild.

Check the following link,
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=422832

Hi,

Sorry I was unclear.

In crontab (the one the user can edit) the smallest timeperiod is 1 minute. The crontab deamon, which checks the crontab file, runs every 30 seconds.

Hope this clears things up.

Still things are not clear.

The link that I had posted in the previous post had the discussion how cron is implemented.

2 concepts were proceeding:
a) Whether cron implemented polling of 30 or 60 seconds.
(or)
b) job list is constructed and based on the time the next job in the list to be executed, cron would be signalled accordingly.
When cronentry is edited job list is rebuild again.

Hope I have made myself clear.

cron every second????

whatever you are trying to do - this is wrong.

you should tell people what you are trying to achieve not how you think
it should be done.

(Copied from duplicate thread, to get them all in one...
Other thread was closed by moderator.)


maybe you could use this scritp running in background:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

###
### Sample background worker script
### for linuxquestions.org written
### by Florian Harbich (user doc.nice)
###
### Free for use or modification, even if
### useless in this variant...
###

TERMINATORFILE="/var/run/backgroundworker.ctl"
GOON=1
while [ $GOON ]; do
[ -f "$TERMINATORFILE" ] && GOON=0
# do your repeated stuff instead of logger syslog sample here
logger -t BGWorker -- "hi! I'm happy to tell you i'm still alive"
sleep 1
done
rm -f "$TERMINATORFILE"

Bigearsbilly is right - I'd listen to him.

And even if you did find some clever, tricky way to get it to work - it's still probably going to be a poor solution to an ill-defined problem...

PS:
doc.nice is right, too. If you really want some action repeated every second, your best bet is to create some kind of "daemon" background process or service that loops 1x/second. doc.nice showed you an example in a shell script; you could easily do the same thing in any programming language.

Since it was hard for me to find a solution, I thought I'd post here.
Here is how I figured out how to do it on 80 seconds.

*/4 * * * * /scripts/80_second_script
*/4 * * * * sleep 80; /scripts/80_second_script
*/4 * * * * sleep 160; /scripts/80_second_script

Line 1 runs at 0,240,480,etc...
Line 2 runs at 80,320,560, etc...
Line 3 runs at 160,400,640, etc...

Put that all together you get
0,80,160,240,320,400,480,560,640, etc...

You can do this with any number, but the more often the multiples of your number cross the multiples of 60 the less lines you have to write.

Hope this helps someone.

Wow....or you could have just put a "sleep 1" at the end of your script, and looped back around, until you killed the PID or CTRL-C'ed it.

Unless cron can create a new process that then does all its work and shuts down in less than 1 second, the processes will overrun each other.
They'd better be operating on separate and independent bits of data.!
I think the OP should tell us exactly why he'd want to do this.
I suspect that writing your own daemon that pauses for 1 second at the bottom of the processing loop is more appropriate.
If you need it to do its work unit in <1 sec, I'd suggest Perl or C. Shell is not going to be fast enough.

Maybe the OP has solved his problem during the past 2 1/2 years...

jlinkels

Even though this thread is 2 years old, it still comes up in a google search for this topic. I didn't like the solution, so I thought I'd post what I've come up with, for future google searches:

Purpose : run /usr/local/bin/scriptname every 30 seconds, where 30 is configurable


wrapper script (/usr/local/bin/wrapper)
tabs lost in posting
crontab:

Li0nHeart,
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

I can maybe see the idea of the script but it doesn't work. %m is the variable for month so not sure what that calculation is actually trying to compute? Using the variable $i in your sleep statement for anything other then 30 seconds doesn't work. i.e. 20 second intervals the sequence would be x x+20 x+40.

Except for the %m, which of course is kinda dumb, it works.

the value of next is the number of seconds since the last time the command ran.

If it's greater than zero, that means the next run is in (interval-next) seconds, so we calculate that
If it's zero, it runs now.

The for loop is next run to 59 seconds with 'interval' steps.

For instance, if interval is 7 (just for arguments sake, it's a too short interval, 30 or greater would start to make sense), the output of the for loop would be, depending on the moment in time:

1
8
15
22
29
36
43
50
57
So it would set backgroup sleep jobs for those numbers.

So 20 seconds would indeed be, x, x+20, x+40, where x would be 0, so 0, 20, 40
So a job every 20 seconds.

Now it's debatable if you would want to do this, but I've got a user asking to run a job every 30 seconds. It's not live yet, so not sure how the impact on the system will be.