Event based task scheduler?
 

Howdy folks,

I use cron all the time to automate tasks such as running statistics and creating reports. I find that there are other things I need to automate which are based on an event. Example, there's a flat file I'd like to monitor for changes, and when it detects a change it sends those changes off elsewhere. I want to say that I've seen something like cron or anacron before that's event based but don't remember much more than that. Does anyone know Is there an event based task scheduler in the linux world? Or even in the Win2k/XPP world (that's actually where I need it but also need to know the linux side too). Thoughts? Thanks.

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If you think about it, even event-based schedulers have to have some timing mechanism to run checks. You could very easily set up a perl (or even bash) script to check a given file for changes and email you said changes at a given interval, say every five minutes.

Currently I have something similar to this set up, for use in checking whether a particular server has had any ports opened or closed recently. I have a flat file with the results of the last nmap scan. I hold the new results in memory, and test against the old. If there are changes, replace the old with the new and email me a 'diff' output. That way you get a running log of what changes have been made, on a case-by-case basis.

Hopefully that will give you some ideas.