in reply to Exec'd perl running wild on cpu-time

If you want a script to run periodically, this is always a call for cron, the program that starts tasks under the several variants of Unix. Then you can do away with the while(1){} loop and let your program run just once every 5 minutes. If you are working under Win32, there is either the dreaded Scheduler service under Windows 9x (avoid it, it needs a person logged in), or the at service under NT, which has a different syntax but does what cron does under Unix.

Much more interesting though is, why your Perl program racks up that much CPU time at all, but I'm at a loss here.

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RE: Re: Exec'd perl running wild on cpu-time
by jeroenes (Priest) on Nov 13, 2000 at 18:19 UTC
    Actually, I run the script continously. But, before finding the "open terminal" solution, I was thinking about making a cron job to periodically kill and restart the script. This way, I could get rid of the open terminal day and night and weekends...

    Indeed, I consider the CPU-black-holish thing puzzling. Maybe there is (and I hope so) a obvious/ stupid flaw in my way of handling the script.

[reply]

      Of course, this is drifting away from Perl, but in the spirit of the Right Tool for The Right Job, cron knows all about weekdays and time slots. I would use cron (or at, which can do that stuff under NT) with the following crontab entry to ensure that it checks every 5 minutes during the week, from 7:00h to 20:00h, monday through friday : 

      0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 7-20 * * 1-5

      [download]
      Note: I didn't check that line and also I only worked from the crontab (5) manpage. Usually this means that some tweaking is required afterwards.

[reply]
[d/l]
        Instead of 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 you can also write */5 for every 5 minutes: 
        */5 7-20 * * 1-5

        [download]

        [ar0n]

[reply]
[d/l]

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