On 07/03/12 17:21, Mark Rogers wrote:
It seems to do all I want it to do, albeit in quite a convoluted way to set up. I don't really understand why nobody has tweaked cron to support an extra seconds parameter - there seem to be lots of people wanting it, which makes me wonder if there's an underlying reason why it isn't already done?
I think the reason it isn't done in Cron is probably that there is some general consideration that a script that needs to run every second is going about $problem in the wrong way.
Without knowing the specifics of what you are trying to do..many tasks that need to be done at that frequency would probably be better handled by a daemon with proper start/stop management etc.
There is an overhead associated with launching scripts at that frequency and of course you have to take steps to make sure a problem doesn't end up with the script running into itself or when the system is under heavy load....probably it was decided that giving cron 1 second granularity might just encourage people to do bad things :)