scheduling tasks

**cameron** · 03-22-2002, 03:27 PM

Ok, here is what I want to do, and here is how I think I should do it.

Quick and dirty, I have a perl program I want to run every five minutes. I don't know how to make it do that, but I think crond is running, so I have two or three programs that give me a GUI for editing cron. Here is what they say

*/5 * * * 0 /home/user/location/program_to_run

Does this look like it will run my program every five minutes? If not, or if there is a better way to do it, I'm certainly open to suggestions. I tried reading the man pages for cron and crontab, but it didnt' help me any.

If you are interested in the long explanation, here it is:

I want to get my hotmail in Evolution (or Kmail, mutt, anything other than a browser). I found a program called hotwayd that I got installed, but I can't figure out how to connect to it (it is a pop3-webmail proxy). I read up on it a bit, and found that it is based on another program called httpmail. I got httpmail working, too, but the same issue. Fortunately there is a separate program with httpmail called get_httpmail. It downloads your hotmail into a standard mbox folder. Now I can use get_httpmail to download my hotmail, and use Evolution to check that local mbox for mail. Not quite as quick and easy as getting the proxy to work, but it'll do for now. The catch is that I need a way to run get_httpmail every five minutes so that I can set Evolution to check the local mbox every six minutes, and always have my mail there for me without having to manually run get_httpmail. That's why I want to schedule it. If, however, someone wants to figure out how to configure a mail client to use the httpmail/pop3 proxy, that would be even better, but I've been at that for months with no luck (even emailed the developer, and while he tried to help me get it running, when I asked what to use in the "server" settings for clients I got no response).

Thanks in advance for any help on this,

Cameron

**pbharris** · 03-22-2002, 03:45 PM

hello,
The crontab entry looks good - i am wondering if this could be handled better with ftechmail...

**Killer_Penguin** · 03-22-2002, 04:01 PM

hello,
The crontab entry looks good - i am wondering if this could be handled better with ftechmail...

Doubt it. Hotmail doesn't allow simple pop logins to it.

**cameron** · 03-22-2002, 04:47 PM

well, i've been fiddling with this off and on all day. all i can determine is that either A) cron isn't running, B) cron isn't telling get_httpmail.pl to run, C) get_httpmail.pl is being told to run, but isn't, or D) cron isn't running get_httpmail.pl every five minutes

i know get_httpmail.pl is working, because i can just open up a terminal and run it from the command line no problem. i'm going to look for cron logs, or something similar...does anyone have any other ideas?

**cameron** · 03-22-2002, 05:00 PM

according to /var/log/cron
.........CROND[8555]: (user) CMD (/home/user/programlocation/get_httpmail.pl)

that makes me think that cron is at least trying to run get_httpmail.pl, but it isn't...httpmail.pl gives output (just "this is what i'm going" stuff), does that matter? aslo, it is a pearl script (is that the right word?)...should that matter?

**imported_Psycho** · 03-22-2002, 05:30 PM

Hello cameron,

I would think you would have to use...
*/5 * * * 0 perl /home/user/location/script_to_run.pl

this is assuming perl is in the path.

I haven't used perl much in Linux yet, but in WinDoze you have to give the script as an argument to perl.

**cameron** · 03-22-2002, 06:22 PM

well, i tried "perl /home/location/program.pl" and i tried "/home/location/./program.pl" and neither of them work. is there some other way, besides cron, that might also work, to schedule to running of a program (frequency of 5 minutes)?