A few crickets heard in this question. Good ‘ol RTFC with some discrete event simulation papers and Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron#Multi-user_capability The algorithm used by this cron is as follows: On start-up, look for a file named .crontab in the home directories of all account holders. For each crontab file found, determine the next time in the … Read more
taskschd.msc is available in Windows Vista and later. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721871.aspx I could have sworn I’d seen a little task scheduler GUI like you’re talking about prior to Vista, but maybe I was thinking of the “Add Scheduled Task” wizard. You might have to settle for opening the scheduled tasks explorer with this command: control schedtasks I … Read more
At a high level, there are two separate mechanisms to understand. The first is the kernel entry/exit mechanism: this switches a single running thread from running usermode code to running kernel code in the context of that thread, and back again. The second is the context switch mechanism itself, which switches in kernel mode from … Read more
I spent quite a bit of time also looking to launch a simple Python program at 01:00. For some reason, I couldn’t get cron to launch it and APScheduler seemed rather complex for something that should be simple. Schedule (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/schedule) seemed about right. You will have to install their Python library: pip install schedule This … Read more
The documentation says srun is used to submit a job for execution in real time while sbatch is used to submit a job script for later execution. They both accept practically the same set of parameters. The main difference is that srun is interactive and blocking (you get the result in your terminal and you … Read more
subprocess.Popen does exactly what you want. from subprocess import Popen p = Popen([‘watch’, ‘ls’]) # something long running # … do other stuff while subprocess is running p.terminate() (Edit to complete the answer from comments) The Popen instance can do various other things like you can poll() it to see if it is still running, … Read more