As other responses have indicatated cron may not be the best solution but you want to use it here is how you could do it...

Schedule it to start at some time say 1:30pm with a cron entry like the following: 

13 30 * * * /path/to/myscript.pl

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Have the program print the pid (available in perl as the var $$) to a file like /tmp/myscript.pid and add a second line to cron like: 

15 30 * * * kill `cat /tmp/myscript.pid`

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To kill the app 2 hour later at 3:30pm. Of course you could make the kill fancier if you didn't want an error if the script had finished running...

In case you were not aware you edit cron with the command crontab -e. See man crontab for more details.

-monkfish (The Fishy Monk)

In reply to Re: Cron Question by monkfish
in thread Cron Question by Anonymous Monk

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