runwhen

Releases

runwhen is devoid of warranty and is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. But that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea for you to distribute modified versions. (That includes repackaging.) I'd like to know if you plan to do that.

This link always points to the latest version (currently 2021.04.30).

Older versions are published for historical interest.

You can get the latest development sources with:

$ git clone git://git.dogmap.org/runwhen.git

Dependencies

To build runwhen, you need Laurent Bercot's skalibs package. Edit conf-compile/depend_* as necessary during installation. Aside from the obsolete commands, runwhen is believed to work with both TAI clocks and POSIX clocks. (TAI-clock systems should use a right/ time zone and have /etc/leapsecs.dat; POSIX-clock systems should use a non-right/ time zone and have no /etc/leapsecs.dat.)

Installation

slashpackage is a good thing. You can read more about it here. If you don't already have /package, create it (on any filesystem you like, as long as it's accessible by the name “/package”):

# mkdir -p /usr/local/package
# ln -s /usr/local/package /
# chmod +t /package/.

Then run sp-install:

# sp-install runwhen-VERSION.tar.bz2

Or, if you like to do things manually, unpack the tarball and run package/install:

# cd /package
# bunzip2 < /path/to/runwhen-VERSION.tar.bz2 |
> tar -xpf -
# cd admin/runwhen-VERSION
# package/install

Read package/README and package/INSTALL for more detailed instructions.

Documentation

• runwhen overview and rationale
• A runwhen example
• The rw-sleep program sleeps until a given time and executes a given command.
• The rw-add program computes the sum of two timestamps.
• The rw-sub program computes the difference of two timestamps.
• The rw-min program computes the smaller of two timestamps.
• The rw-max program computes the larger of two timestamps.
• The rw-match program computes a timestamp matching given constraints.
• The rw-touch program updates a file's last-modified time.

Obsolete commands, no longer in the current version:

• The delayrun program sleeps for $DELAY seconds and executes a given command.
• The caldelay program sets $DELAY to make delayrun wake up at a given calendar time.
• The maxinterval program applies a lower bound to $DELAY.
• The mininterval program applies an upper bound to $DELAY.

Current known bugs

None.

Related links

• Jonas Pasche has written a migration tool to convert crontab files to runwhen services. (The last time I checked, it still used the older obsolete runwhen commands.)
• Uwe Ohse has written another scheduler for use with daemontools. It seems to be somewhat closer to cron than runwhen is.

To do

• Maybe a rw-match-like tool to find the nearest past time matching some criteria.
• ,w and ,d/,m/,y should be able to be used together in rw-match.