executing a command after a period of time

[vickey_20]

Hey there
I have come across a situation where I need a command to execute by itself after a period of time. Say for a simple example clear the screen after every 5 min ( as simple as that , but that's not wat i want to do lolz) . How do i accomplish that???

[GNU-Fan]

Shedule commands for single execution: man at; man atd

Periodic execution: man crontab

[kthxbai2u]

What about a cron job? Those are rather easy to find info on setting up.... Google it !

[i92guboj]

If you provide more details I might be able to give a more adequate response.

However, in bash you could do this with a simple loop, for example:

while true; do echo foo; sleep 2; done

[vickey_20]

ok like i want to see the ppl who are logged on the tty after every five min.

[i92guboj]

Then you could do something like this on a terminal:

while true; do users; sleep 2; done

Or if you preffer a fancy notification you could use:

while true; do notify-send "$(users)"; sleep 5m; done

Or

while true; do users|osd_cat; sleep 5m; done

[vickey_20]

But every time i ll have to write the code manually. Is'nt there a way by which I can just tell bash to execute a script after some time.

[rjayavrp]

try this.....

at now + 5 minutes < $HOME/listofcommands.txt

i googled it,, and i have to test.

i hope this will help u.

[i92guboj]

But every time i ll have to write the code manually. Is'nt there a way by which I can just tell bash to execute a script after some time.

That depends on your desktop and how do you start X. Most desktops have an autostart features, standalone wm's do have a config file which can usually launch whatever you want at start (some of them might have a graphical tool to configure this).

In kde you can drop any script you want to run at startup on ~/.kde/Autostart (at least in 3.x, I don't know about 4.x). No idea on how gnome do this, but I guess the place to look into is the session manager.

If you start X by hand with the startx command then you can put whatever you want to run in xinitrc, make sure you append an & at the end of the line so the command is backgrounded.

About the "at" command, it won't work for this purpose. "at" just schedules something to run at a later time, but it won't re-run it at regular intervals. At least not that I know of (though admittedly I haven't ever used it. I consider it to be useless, completely useless. You can just do "sleep 5m; whatever_command" instead.

[vickey_20]

how to do that in red hat 5