Slightly newb - autolaunching, scripts, and saving output
 

Thanks to anyone who can help. I know nothing about scripting, but I know it's what I need here.

I need to create a script that will run once per minute for a one hour period. The script will only need to run qshape, but it will need to take the qshape output and append it to a text file. I need to know how to write the script, and how to output the console messages to a text file.

I'm a slight newbie myself, but here's the gist:

1) Create a script
2) create a cronjob with the output going to a file.

If you know what you type from the command line, your script generally looks like:
Then save it and chmod +x it.

Then to create a cronjob, type crontab -e and set it to run at the appropriate time:

* 6 * * * $HOME/script.sh >> $HOME/script.out 2>&1

This should run the script every minute for the 6 AM hour of everyday. The fields are minute, hour, day, month, day of week. See man crontab. The 2>&1 should output both errors and STDOUT.

Thanks. Will this overwrite the output file or append to it?

One ">" means overwrite, two ">>" means to append. You can try it from the command line just to make sure, just type ls -l >> ls.txt a couple three times and then look at the file.

Good to know! Thanks! I'll try the script and see what I can get.

You might have to adjust the crontab values a bit. I'm sort of guessing that * will work for the minutes section. It might be that you have to use */1 (which means in increments of 1) for the minutes tab or 0-59. Anyway, good luck!

OK, here's what I come up against. I am logged in as root when I do this, so that's not the cause. When I run crontab -e, it won't let me edit, just view. Running Suse 9. Any thought anyone?

Your crontab table is probably opened with vim. You have to use vim commands to get in insert (edit) mode.
Try exiting the crontab table by typing ":q" and press Return key. If this gets you back to command line search for an tutorial for vim. Or type vimtutor which should give you a tutorial of about 30 minutes.

There you go! I have officially announced myself to the world as a newb! Thanks! I'll google crontab and look for a list of commands.

Google for vim, crontab googling won't give you much in the way of commands to use vim...

Or better yet:
If you like nano (it's pretty easy) you can add it to your /etc/profile...

Next and hopefully final question.

Script written, runs perfectly in console.
Cronlog running the script when I tell it to.
This is the script:

date >> test.txt 2>&1
qshape.pl >> test.txt 2>&1

I get "Command not Found" when cronlog runs the script. When I put in \urs\sbin\qshape.pl instead, qshape runs but cannot find the queue files.

I'm not familiar with qshape, but is there a way to point it to the queue files in the script?

Found this, http://www200.pair.com/mecham/spam/s...r20050626.html
I'll give it a shot and let you know tomorrow.

vi /etc/cron.d/qshape-cron

And insert (2 lines):
PATH=/usr/sbin
31 7 * * * postfix /usr/sbin/qshape incoming active deferred 2>&1 |/usr/bin/mail -s "qshape sfa" root

Would it put the output in /usr/sbin/test.txt ?
It also looks like the slashes are going in the Windows direction. Is this intentional?