If it starts and stops every few minutes (e.g. as a cron job) rather than running in the background, the easiest way to keep track is probably to write a file somewhere that contains any relevant data you care to keep track of. If you just want to know when the last time you sent an email, you might be able to use the last-modified date of the file (and just "touch" it each time you send an email). If you want to store more information, you can store the time and any diagnostic information (e.g. last event time). Be sure to pay attention to what the running environment is- background jobs often run in a different environment than the user that created them and you need to specify full pathnames for files.

In reply to Re: Email Thresholding by bitingduck
in thread Email Thresholding by bfdi533

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.