Running regularly

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

> Before I start throwing out ideas that I'm sure aren't new to readers here,
> I have a simple question that perhaps I should post to comp.unix.questions
> or comp.lang.perl, but.... Can I, and how would I, get a perl script to
> kick in and send out mail every few minutes when I am NOT logged in. Is this
> possible on Netcom?

Most public Unix systems will not let you do this, in my experience.
The two Unix commands which usually give you the ability to run programs
at regular intervals are "at" and "crontab".  You can read the man pages
and try running these to see if they are enabled for you.

I had an idea for how to get around this, so that people could run batching
remailers which sent out mail, say, every 30 minutes or whatever.  (Unlike
Xenon, I am of a generation which is accustomed to waiting more than a few
seconds for mail to travel across the country!)  The idea was simply for
someone who DID have an account which would let them use at or cron, to
run a program which would simply send a "ding" message (not to be confused
with a "ping" message :) at regular intervals to a list of subscribers.
This message could have a special header field so that the remailer programs
could easily recognize it and take whatever action they wanted, like running
Karl Barrus' script to scan a directory for pending outgoing remailer mail
and send it out.  (Karl has had batching running for months, as well as
postage-stamp-based remailers (albeit with non-anonymous stamps).  He is
way ahead of most of this discussion.)

Hal