OpenEuphoria

Re: Sending Email at Designated Times

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Sep 09, 2005
• 546 views

cklester wrote:
> I'm going to have a list of members and those members are going to be able
> to schedule reminder emails for delivery either in the morning, afternoon,
> evening, or night. I'm guessing I'll need to set up a cron thingie which
> will run the email distribution program at those pre-set times. Is that right?
> Can anybody give me some hints, tips, pointers to docs, and tricks on
> setting this up?

You need to create a small text file.
I call mine "mycrontab".
It has 3 lines:

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:$HOME/bin
45 * * * * $HOME/euforum/filter.exu

The third line says "run $HOME/euforum/filter.exu every hour
at the 45 minute mark. filter.exu normally runs for 55 minutes,
then cron starts it up again. That means if filter.exu dies,
cron will get EUforum going again within an hour. 
(ex.err is emailed to me by the crash routine).

I run the command:
   crontab mycrontab
to make it happen. To check, I can say:
   crontab -l
and it will display the current settings.

I also use cron for automatic daily backups and other stuff.
It's very useful. Type: 
  man cron 
or
  man crontab 
for more options.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com