Scheduling cron in Seconds

[Mohammad Sanaullah]

Hi All Unix Guru!
As in cron we have minimum time scheduling as one minute, is there any way to use the cron for seconds say 30 sec.

help me out whether it is possible or not, if yes then please any general EXAMPLE for the same.

Thanks in Advance,
Points Later

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

No, cron's resolution is minutes.

If you want seconds, you probably shouldn't be stopping and starting your process and just keep it running all the time as a demon.

While at(1) allows you to specify seconds, you can't use seconds for the "next" option.

[Arturo Galbiati]

Hi,
this is possbile using 'at' command. From man at:

-t spectime Define the absolute time to start the job.

spectime A date and time in the format:

[[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm [ . ss ]

where the decimal digit pairs are
as follows:

CC The first two digits of the
year (19, 20).
YY The second two digits of the
year (69-99, 00-68). See
WARNINGS.
MM The month of the year (01-12).
DD The day of the month (01-31).
hh The hour of the day (00-23).
mm The minute of the hour
(00-59).
ss The second of the minute
(00-61).


Man at for further info.
HTH,
Art

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

first you should be shure, that possibly overlapping crobjobs do not occure or are meaningless.
Then you could start two cronjobs:
* hour day month wday /path/to/jobs args
* hour day month wday sleep 30 && /path/to/jobs args

mfG Peter

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Strange that it haven't been implemented in cron during all these years and same question seems to be popping up from time to time...
...even though the cron daemon checks only once a minute. It could start the job on the appropriate MM and sleep in .ss seconds...

Simple Workaround:
Create a script "delay_cmd"
#!/bin/sh
# Script: delay_cmd
sleep $1
shift
$*

Then run your command with:
delay_cmd 10 mycommand parameters

This would run "mycommand parameters" after sleeping 10 seconds

/Tor-Arne

[Mohammad Sanaullah]

Dear All,
I was aware that scheduling cron in seconds is not possible in general as minimum frequency for cron is one minute but i was looking for any other simple way to take output from cron in seconds.

please forward me any link have information regarding cron and its functionality.

thanks again for all support

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi,

the default man page itself is clear enough, please see:
http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1M/cron.1M.html


and also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crontab

hope this helps!

kind regards
yogeeraj