Flashes of Panic

You already knew that, but I want to vent.

I want to run a perl script on a server once an hour, all the time. On a Linux (or, for that matter, Mac) server, I could just set up cron to run the script hourly, or every third minute, or every seventh minute if I cared that much. (Anyone without the know-how to manage cron wouldn’t have written a perl script which needs hourly running.)

On a Windows server, the most reliable way to do this is using Windows’ built-in Scheduled Tasks. Scheduled Tasks can only run once a day, so I have to set up twenty-four identical Tasks, one for each hour. Tedious, particularly since they can’t be cut-and-pasted and must be created by Wizard, but not such a big deal. I need to provide the Administrator password (twice) to set up the task. And then, since I need to open the Advanced Properties in order to give a command-line argument to the script, I need to provide the Administrator password two more times, making a total of four for every task and a grand total of ninety-six password entries.

Honestly, I’d rather read cron manual pages.

Update: Right, so after I make all 24 tasks, I discover that in the Advanced Properties section of each job, the job can be scheduled to repeat at intervals. So we only need one job, but the wizard is worthless and I still hate Windows.

Now Playing: My Love by Auktyon

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