Mandrake 8, Perl, ppstats and me

[Mandrill]

Ok....I give.....how do I associate the .pl extensions with the perl interprater so I cna run stats?

 

[efun]

at the top of your perl script there should be something that looks like
#!/usr/bin/perl

just tells the os what to use to execute the code. If your talking about in apache you might want to add something that looks like

AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi .pl

but really with the ppstats you just need to set up a cron job to run the perl script every once in a while and you look at the html it generates.

 

[ss59]

on a side note, how does one set up a cron

 

[Poof]

I run my ppstats like this:

perl ppstats-rc5-7.1.pl.

which explicitly calls perl to run the perl script.

As for the cron job - there are a couple ways to do this but the one way I've found that will consistently work is to su to root and then edit the /etc/crontab file to include the new job. So in mine, I have:

SHELL=/bin/bash
.
.
<other stuff>.
.
00,30 * * * * user cd /usr/ppstats-rc5-7.1.pl; perl ppstats-rc5-7.1.pl
.
.

where &quot;00,30 * * * *&quot; means it will run the scripts at the top and bottom of the hour (every 30 minutes), every day, week, month... and &quot;user&quot; = some user account that has access to go in and run the script.

The other way is to run &quot;crontab -e -u <user>&quot; and edit a specific file for the specified &quot;<user>&quot;'s cron file. If your account will do it and you're logged in as you, you can just do &quot;crontab -e&quot;.

Again - you could try both, but I've found that the lazy way of editing /etc/crontab seems to work for me and my Red Hat 6.2.

🙂

 

[ss59]

thnx

 

[efun]

And if you are wondering about the syntax for cron here ya go,

Minute Hour DayofMonth Month DayofWeek command

so

0 0 * * 0 /usr/sbin/mapupdate

will run the mapupdate command at midnight on sunday. So on etc..

You can also comma delimit fields,

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /home/ppstats/ppstats-rc5.pl

will run ppstats every 10 minutes. Anyway..