Repeat a unix command every x seconds forever.

Question

There's a builtin unix command repeat whose first argument is the number of times to repeat a command, where the command (with any arguments) is specified by the remaining arguments to repeat. For example,

% repeat 100 echo "I will not automate this punishment."

will echo the given string 100 times and then stop.

I'd like a similar command, let's call it forever, that works similarly except the first argument is the number of seconds to pause between repeats, and it repeats forever. For example,

% forever 5 echo "This will get echoed every 5 seconds forever and ever."

I thought I'd ask if such a thing exists before I write it. I know it's like a 2-line perl or python script but maybe there's a more standard way to do this. If not, feel free to post a solution in your favorite scripting language, rosetta stone style.

PS: Maybe a better way to do this would be to generalize repeat to take both the number of times to repeat (with -1 meaning infinity) and the number of seconds to sleep between repeats. The above examples would then become:

% repeat 100 0 echo "I will not automate this punishment."
% repeat -1 5 echo "This will get echoed every 5 seconds forever."

Answer 1

Bash

while + sleep

while true
do 
    echo "Hi"
    sleep 1
done

Answer 2

Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# First argument is number of seconds to sleep between repeats, remaining
# arguments give the command to repeat forever.

$sleep = shift;
$cmd = join(' ', @ARGV);

while(1) {
  system($cmd);
  sleep($sleep); 
}

Answer 3

I like the scripts, but an alternate approach would be to use cron...at least for n = m*60

::blushes:: Hangs head in shame. Thanks Jonathan.

Answer 4

try the 'watch' command.

Usage: watch [-dhntv] [--differences[=cumulative]] [--help] [--interval=] [--no-title] [--version]

watch -n1 command

will run the command every second, forever

OP has asked for link to OS X version of watch: http://www.macports.org/

Answer 5

In bash:

bash -c 'while [ 0 ]; do echo "I will not automate this punishment in absurdum."; done'

(Echo could be replaced by any command...

Or in Perl:

perl -e 'for (;1;) {print "I will not automate this punishment in absurdum.\n"}'

Where print "I will not automate this punishment in absurdum.\n" could be replaced with "any" command surrounded with backticks (`).

And for a pause add a sleep statement inside the for loop.

bash -c 'while [ 0 ]; do echo "I will not automate this punishment in absurdum."; sleep 1; done'

and

perl -e 'for (;1;) {print "I will not automate this punishment in absurdum.\n"; sleep 1}'

Answer 6

Care to try this out (Bash)?

forever ()   {
    TIMES=shift;
    SLEEP=shift;
    if [ "$TIMES" = "-1" ]; then  
        while true;
        do 
            $@
            sleep $SLEEP
        done
    else
        repeat "$TIMES" $@ 
    fi; }

Answer 7

As mentioned by gbrandt, if the 'watch' command is available, definitely use it. Some Unix systems, however, don't have it installed by default (at least they don't where I work).

Here's another solution with slightly different syntax and output (works in BASH and SH):

while [ 1 ] ; do
    <cmd>
    sleep <x>
    echo ">>>>>>>>>>>>>" `date` ">>>>>>>>>>>>>>"
done

Edit: I removed some "." in the last echo statement...holdover from my Perl days ;)