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"It seems to me that 1 is not such a good plan because, if for any reason the script were to fail, the system fails and doesn't restart."

That, right there, is precisely why I recommended picking up a $3 microcontroller for the project instead.

A microcontroller does one thing, and one thing only... executes the code you write. It does nothing more. It is not have the layers upon layers of software and complexity nor the potential problems that a script has running on top of an OS does.

You've gone the Pi route, so I'll stick with that. If the system fails or doesn't restart, cron isn't going to help you, so 1 & 2 are prone to the same type of failure there. However, if the system does fail, you've got bigger problems anyway.

Unless you're willing to get into extra complexity of having a watchdog type script running to monitor the main process, I'd stick with cron, ensuring that the script that's being run verifies that it can never start more than one instance of itself, and if it makes such an attempt, fail and send out a warning message of some sort.

In reply to Re: Continuous or timed? by stevieb
in thread Continuous or timed? by Bod

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