Win32 look at 'AT'.

Un*x look at 'Cron'.

-Nitrox

I wish it was Unix, so I could use cron jobs, but unfortunately its Win32

It sounds like the only reason to have it running continuously is to sleep, which means you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. You need to rely on the OS to schedule execution at a particular date/time. What you're looking for is either cron under *nix, or the Task Scheduler under Windows NT/2000/XP.

Well, not to through another wrench into the mix, but it may have to be run once every hour for a 24 hour period ... hmmm ... maybe I should look at the Task Scheduler in Win32.

Thanks

I agree with your comment and would definitely recommend you wrap your script into a batch file either via pl2bat or by handrolling a batch file to interact with your program. Then whack it into task scheduler.

I've found this to be the best way on win32 (for me at least). On the win2k environments I work with I can also allow my programs to run as particular users. You could use the runas command to replicate this (assuming your windows platform supports it).

ie:

C:\>runas
RUNAS USAGE:

RUNAS [/profile] [/env] [/netonly] /user:<UserName> program

   /profile        if the user's profile needs to be loaded
   /env            to use current environment instead of user's.
   /netonly        use if the credentials specified are for remote acc
+ess only.
   /user           <UserName> should be in form USER@DOMAIN or DOMAIN\
+USER
   program         command line for EXE.  See below for examples
[download]



Hope that helps :)

Sometimes it is worth avoiding the local OS scheduling framework, for example when you want something portable.

You can use localtime() and timelocal() (from Time::Local) to convert between absolute number of seconds and a 9 element array giving dates.

# This is from memory and almost certainly contains bugs
use Time::Local;

$now = time;
@now_array = localtime($now);

# 1:00am is tomorrow if it is after that today
if($now_array[2] >= 1)
  {
    $now_array[3]++;
  }

# Set 1:00am in the structure
$now_array[2] = 1;
$now_array[1] = 0;

# Convert to seconds
$then = timelocal(@now_array);

# Now wait
sleep($then - $now);
[download]

It is also a good idea not to sleep for the whole time but for an hour or so at a time (because clocks drift and long sleeps are sometimes inaccurate. Another thing that could be important is to arrange for your process to be restarted if it dies and to make sure there is only one of them running.