in reply to Of cron job management

Well, if I was a script and there'd be no work from my precessor be wasted, and in-timeness (how'd you say that?) is of concern, and I could go ahead where my precessor leaped off, I'd tell the previous instance to let go. Otherwise I'd just slink away.

One point of interest - since the DATA filehandle points to the script which contains it, scripts can flock it and advertise later instances that there might be a running instance, as described here. Of course it's prudent to check if an instance is really running.

--shmem 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom