I have a script that parses a website for data and prints out some HTML. I call this script every 15 minutes via cron. I want to modify it so that it will send me an IM when it completes but I ran into some problems:

First, I included Net::AIM in the script itself so it would connect send me the HTML and disconnect. GREAT! But, of course, doing this every 15 minutes got me locked out of AOL (at least temporarily)

So I thought it would be better to start up an AOL bot that is always running (eventually could respond to IM from me as well.) But then how do I get the data from my script that is running every 15 minutes from cron? The length of time it takes for this script to run is varied so I'd rather not just sleep 900 and I'd like to always run every 15 minutes.

I don't really want to dump it to a file and read in the file, I want it to be more expansive than that (maybe even support multiple users eventually which would require I send a username and the message to my AIMbot) I thought about opening a socket, but that seemed stupid as I'm on the same machine. LOL... I also thought about forking one of the processes, but I'm not sure what that means :-) or if it would do any good because I would again lose control of my cron start times

So is there a relatively easy way to do this that I'm missing?

In reply to Net::AIM with another script? by hoopsbwc34

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