[X-Unix] Cron problem solved

[Dan DeRusha]

What do you use this for?




On 6/24/05 2:08 PM, "Marley Graham" <mgraham at aquaflo.com> wrote:

> Many thanks to Norman, Eugene, Eric, David, Robert & Brian who helped
> me figure out my problems with Cron and date scripting, and with
> achieving a much cleaner approach.
> 
> My first problem was to get the date appended to a screencapture file
> at the time of file creation by Cron. I created a script that worked
> fine on the command line, but failed in Cron. The solution  was to
> enclose the date command in quotes for Cron.
> 
> The second problem was getting the script to run on a client computer
> which I log onto with ssh. The solution to this problem was to use
> root's crontab rather than the administrator's.
> 
> Several people gave very helpful suggestions for cleaning up my
> scripts and consolidating the functions. It was pointed out that the
> command "date +%H:M:S" would do the same thing as my "exacttime"
> script, and that it could be incorporated into my screencapture
> script. (Or better yet, leave out the colons in the date format to
> avoid future problems).
> 
> So, here is what my screencapture script looks like:
>          /usr/sbin/screencapture mg$(/bin/date "+%H%M%S")
> 
> That is put into Cron using sudo crontab -u root -e:
>          0,30 7-16 * * 1-6 /screenpictimed
> 
> And gives an output like:
>          mg103000
> 
> At the end of the day, I use ps2pdf to convert the files to pdf, so I
> can view them as a series of screen shots in iMovie. I created the
> following script which I run to do the conversion and remove the
> original files:
> 
> #!/bin/sh        #psconvert
> 
> for screen in $(ls mg*)
> do
>          ps2pdf $screen
> done
> rm mg*[1-9]
> exit
> 
> which leaves a series of files like:
>          mg103000.pdf
> 
> So, thanks again for all of the suggestions. I hope the results will
> be useful to someone.
> 
> Marley Graham
> Aqua-Flo Supply
> ==============
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Dan DeRusha
IT Manager
Schawk

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