playfight

I am using Redhat 9.0, gcc -

I am trying to write a simple c application that:

* starts when I turn the computer on
* checks to see what time and day it is
* if it is saturday, 8 p.m. it tells a different .c application to run

I found bits and pieces in the forum to help me, but I am not quite sure where to start. I have a basic understanding of C, but I havn't done anything with background (stealth?) applications or date/time. And I have mostly used mac before, still new to linux.

Thanks

Brian

you could make it a cron job.

Salem

Type this at the command prompt
man crontab

Example line
00 20 * * Sat /path/to/my/saturday_program

__________________
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.

playfight

Thanks,

cron certainly seems to be the way to go, but I am not getting it to work.

I created a crontab for my user:
15 10 * * * /src/hello/ a.out

so at 10:15 I tried to run my c application called a.out that is in the path shown above. the test program just outputs the current time/date into the shell window, but nothing happened at 10:15.

any suggestions?

Salem

Well it won't output it to the current shell window - you may not even be logged in when cron runs

By default, cron will send mail to your local account on your machine.

If you want something in a specific file, then perhaps
15 10 * * * /src/hello/a.out > /home/me/log.txt

__________________
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.

rotis23

send your results to syslog within your C program.

Then just grep for them when you want to check.

Crond will send any data sent to stdout in a mail to the user who ran the cron job WHEN the program completes.

playfight

Thanks everyone!
Cron was working, just not seeing it. Tried to make a log.txt, but nothing was being written to it. But at some point, the shell told me I had new mail, which I went and checked, so cron is running my app.