Opening and closing applications periodically
Opening and closing applications periodically
- Subject: Opening and closing applications periodically
- From: Kristofer Widholm <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 13:00:30 -0400
At 19:38 -0700 2003.07.17, Erik Gilchrist wrote:
I just signed up am on DIGEST. Looked for an archive...
Anyhow, looking to launch an application in /Applications and then
every 2-4 hours quit and then relaunch it. It is a client that allows
me to use the NO-IP.com service and will update the NO-IP servers. It
is a beta (nothing but stable releases for OS X) and it works but tends
to just get confused at times.
Oh dear, I think I'll get shot for this, but I think there's an
appropriate tool for every job, and in this case, the way to go is a
combination of the cron utility and a brief shell script.
Cron is built into Mac OS X and allows you to schedule tasks to be
run. It, like most things UNIX-y (not a trademark), is a little
convoluted, but very flexible. If you're not familiar with cron,
download the freeware cron editing utility Cronnix. It's pretty good.
Basically, cron will execute tasks on a minute by minute, or hourly,
or daily, weekly, monthly basis. I use it run several maintenance
tasks (it also changes my e-mail sig every four hours).
Just write an AppleScript that will launch your application. Save it
as a run only application and tuck it away. Write another that closes
your application nicely.
Now, just give cron the following parameters:
30 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * *
/Path/to/your/Applescript/CloseApplication
35 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * *
/Path/to/your/Applescript/OpenApplication
What this tells cron is this:
line 1: On the 30 minute of hours 0,4,8,12,16,20 of every day of
every week of every month do ...
line 2: On the 35th minute of hours 0,4,8,.....
It will run your close script at the half hour mark, wait five
minutes (give it time to close and cleanup and whatever), and then,
open your program.
With the cronnix configuration utility, cron is really easy to
configure. You owe it to yourself if you're doing scheduled tasks to
look into it.
K
ps. You can also open and close your application with a simple
command line argument to cron, but then I'd probably get kicked off
this list forever.
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