Fellow Monks,

I'm building a CGI::Application based website which requires some special functionality outside the normal 'run-modes'. It's basically a cleanup routine, but I'm not sure the best way to fire it so that it only gets run once (daily, or thereabouts), and I'm trying to avoid a system scheduler (cron, or the like).

Ideally, I'd like something like this:
  • Every invocation of the CGI has a 33% chance of forking a 'cleanup' child process
  • If we become a cleanup process, somehow make sure we're the only one (-- how can I do this?)
  • Cleanup process checks to see if there are any tasks past due, takes care of them and quietly exits.

    ...but this approach seems pretty ghetto, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to try something like this. SuperSearch isn't yielding much, but maybe I'm using the wrong search terms.

    Thanks in advance,

    --twerq

    In reply to CGI daily 'cleanup' task by twerq

    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.