A better f***ing cron… fcron. cron in seconds

There have been times when i wished that I could trigger the script multiple times in a minute using cron.

Considering how old the system crontab (Vixie cron) is in linux, they should have had the option to trigger the cron in seconds.

I recently had to run a script multiple times in a minute and didn’t really want to use sleep. During my search I stumbled across FCRON. Its an enhanced cron with more features.

You can download fcron from http://fcron.free.fr/. Like the url says it is free.

Installation is pretty straight forward.

I happened to install it on debian jessie, but should work in almost any *nix based system.

Installation guide ( debian jessie )
~# wget http://fcron.free.fr/archives/fcron-3.2.0.src.tar.gz
~# tar -xzf fcron-3.2.0.src.tar.gz
~# cd fcron-3.2.0/
~# ./configure
~# make
~# make install
~# /etc/init.d/fcron start

fcron by default uses vim as its editor. I like using nano for simple edits. To change the default editor to nano
~# nano /usr/local/etc/fcron.conf

Change the line where it says editor to your favourite editor
editor = /usr/bin/nano

Done…

eg. to trigger the fcron every 10 seconds,
~# fcrontab -e
@ 10s php5 -f /location/to/your/script.php

links:
Fcron Hom Page – http://fcron.free.fr
Documentation – http://fcron.free.fr/doc/en/index.html