Glad you asked this question, as it's something I'm going to have to grapple with in a few days. I'll watch this thread with interest to see if the answer to my question comes up :)

At the moment, how I'm planning to approach it (subject to revision by sibling monks) is 
while (1) {
    open OFF, "off.txt";
    last if <OFF>;
    # all the code goes here
    sleep 5;
}
print "you turned me off!";

[download]
off.txt is a blank file. So then my script runs and runs and runs until I put something into off.txt, at which point the script breaks out of the loop.

As I say, that's how I'd do it... but I'd also ask how to do it before I did it that way. As you have.

§ George Sherston

In reply to Re: Persistence by George_Sherston
in thread Best way to make a script run persistently (daemon) by Dalin

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.