Cron question with CentOS...

Hello!

I've been setting up a server for my website, that uses a server version of CentOS. In case you don't know, CentOS is a community-supported free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I'm wondering if the following is possible. You see, my server runs a IRC bot (which is a java logbot available at jibble.org) to log all the things said in a channel on a IRC network. I boot it up currently via SSH, using PuTTY on my windows PC. Only thing is, when I close down PuTTY, it closes the bot too.

I'm wondering if it's possible to make a cron job that runs every 2 hours or so, that looks for the java process (as the bot is invoked by java -classpath....) and if it's running, exits, but if it's not running, it starts the java process with the needed parameters.

Is this possible? I don't want to have clones of my IRC bot starting up every 2 hours. (If so, what would the script be?)

Thanks in advance.

You could write a script that tries to find the process id (using ps or pgrep) of the bot, and, exits if it finds a valid id, or starts the bot if it doesn't.

Code:

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man ps
man pgrep

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Okay, sounds interesting. I'll look into it.

EDIT:
I ran this:

Code:

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pgrep java

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..and got nothing. Okay, good. So then I started the bot via PuTTY. Now, I ran the same command and I got this:

Code:

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[root@krystalserv ~]# pgrep java
3497
[root@krystalserv ~]#

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...so 3497 is the job ID, is it? Now I have to somehow manage to make a script for cron that starts it (java bot process) up if pgrep doesn't output anything.

I've not scheduled cron jobs before, but maybe this page will be of some help.

I'm not good at writing shell scripts on the fly like this, but you've got the idea.

Assign the output of "pgrep java" to a variable. Then check the contents of that variable. If it's empty, execute the command to start the java bot, if it's not, then exit the script.

It should be pretty easy to figure out how to throw that together in Bash (or whatever your favourite scripting environment is).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by smolloy

I'm not good at writing shell scripts on the fly like this, but you've got the idea.

Assign the output of "pgrep java" to a variable. Then check the contents of that variable. If it's empty, execute the command to start the java bot, if it's not, then exit the script.

It should be pretty easy to figure out how to throw that together in Bash (or whatever your favourite scripting environment is).

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Ah, I was experimenting with PHP and running the bot via there (exec commands and such). If $logbotrun was empty, start it (java command and such), if the variable had something in it (process id), the script exited.

Only thing that it did was on the exec('java ...'); command, it started the javabot, but php's command line interface just hung there! Oh wells, I'll see how this works. Thanks again!

I have no idea about PHP, but it sounds like you're almost there :D