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Posted by Philip Hallstrom on 07/01/05 02:54
> What are the options to get code to run on the server (every XX
> minutes), without any user interaction, etc.
If you are running on a unix like system (linux, freebsd, solaris, etc.)
cron can do this for you. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
If on windows there are probably scheduling applications, but I don't know
anything about them.
> Example 1: If I have a directory that contains files, can I write a
> script that will delete all files older that 5 days?
Yes. Write the script to do what you want it to do and then have cron
execute it on the time period you define.
> Example 2: If I write an email web application, and the user wants to
> send an email to 50 people, can I write a script that will send emails
> individually XX seconds apart from each other, but have the progress
> interfaced with the web page the user is on so they can see the
> percentage progress of sent emails.
Yes. This is a bit trickier as you would need to coordinate with a
backend process that looks for emails that are ready to send them, does
the sending and also writes out some status info (either to a temp file or
to a database, or to shared memory). Then your web page would need to
repeatedly check that status to update the user on the progress.
> Also, back to the email example, is it possible that once an email is
> composed and sent, that the web application can scan the email for
> viruses, then show a message to the user if a virus was found in their
> email, if no virus found, the email is then sent to the users as above.
Yes. You could install a virus scanner such as ClamAV
(http://www.clamav.net/) and have it scan the message prior to handing it
off to the backend process that does the sending.
> How would I scan an email for viruses (or spam?)?
Same idea, but use something like SpamAssassin
(http://spamassassin.apache.org/)
> And, scan it only once so that system resources are not used to scan
> unnecessarily for every recipient?
Sure. Just do it before handing it off to the script that actually does
the mailing...
-philip
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