Way to add a scheduled task?

[youradds]

Hi,

Does anyone know of a way to setup a scheduled task, from a Perl script? NB: This is a WINDOW's machine (yeah, I know... but its got things on it we need .. i.e the win32::OLE module, to link into Word).

If this was a UNIX server, then I'd just use a crontab option, but NT doesn't support that.

Anyone got any suggestions? I've tried looking around for a module, and even looked through all the Win32 modules, but none of them seemed to do what I need

TIA

Andy

 

[Rieekan]

I use a pure Perl cron utility to run my cron jobs. It has the added benefit of working almost exactly like a Unix cron, so there's little to be done when porting a script from Windows to Unix that writes to the cron file. It's only current drawback is that it does require a user to be logged into the machine at all times.

Give it a shot and see what you think.

- Rieekan

 

[youradds]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Looks very promising I'll install it, and see how it works. We have a machine on 24-7 anyway, with a UPS ... so the user should be able to remain on at all times, via a Terminal Connection.

Thanks again

Andy

 

[Xaqte]

I use Win32::TaskScheduler.
Hope this helps!

X

 

[rharsh]

I think AT was available under NT, I just verified it's there for XP - but that probably doesn't do you much good. I seem to remember there was also a utility distributed with the NT 4 Server Res Kit called WINAT. Either of those might be an option for you.

It looks like there might also be a Win32::TaskScheduler module that gives you access to the windows task scheduler.

 

[Haunter]

You can also do this with perls native code but maybe not the most admirable way to do it.

$time = 9000;
while(1){
code.......

sleep($time);
}

haunter@battlestrata.com

 

[youradds]

Hi,

Thanks guys/gals I've managed to write a custom script to do this now. If anyone's interested, its as follows;

#!/perl 

use strict;
use File::Copy;

&init;

sub init {

   my @commands;
   open (READIT,"<crontab")  || die "Cant open crontab. Reason: $!";
    while (<READIT>) {
       push @commands, $_;
    }
   close(READIT);

   my $time = localtime();
   move("crontab","crontab.$time");
   print qq{Moving crontab to "crontab","crontab.$time"\n};

#   `del crontab`;

   open (READIT,">crontab")  || die "Cant open crontab. Reason: $!";
    print READIT "";
   close(READIT);   

   foreach (@commands) {
    	print "Running: $_ \n";
       `$_`;
   }

   sleep 30;
   &init; # restart init

}

This assumes you are using a file called "crontab", and each line contains a system command. E.g;

perl d:/path/to/script.pl --opts
perl d:/path/to/script2.pl --more-opts
perl d:/path/to/script2.pl --more --foo=1
..etc

Thanks again for the pointers

Cheers