I would strongly suggest using cron/scheduled tasks/other cron like things for this. For one main reason: that's what cron is there for. Cron and cousins have been around for a long time and relied upon for critical things (i.e. backups). Cron is very bulletproof. If your program dies - it dies. If a cron job dies.... it happily starts at the next iteration (if it can)... with some nice logging to boot.
The other reason is that cron is the idiom for *nix jobs like this. Once some one says "Well this is supposed to happen every 30 mins" I (and I imagine every other sysadmin) go running for the crontabs. No reason to obscure this in a program.

I would not reinvent the wheel on this one.

grep 
grep> cd pub
grep> more beer

[download]

In reply to Re: Safe to run a constant loop? by grep
in thread Safe to run a constant loop? by Anonymous Monk

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.