Repeat command automatically in Linux

Question

Is it possible in Linux command line to have a command repeat every n seconds?

Say, I have an import running, and I am doing

ls -l
         


        

Answer 1

Running commands periodically without cron is possible when we go with while.

As a command:

while true ; do command ; sleep 100 ; done &
[ ex: # while true;  do echo `date` ; sleep 2 ; done & ]

Example:

while true
do echo "Hello World"
sleep 100
done &

Do not forget the last & as it will put your loop in the background. But you need to find the process id with command "ps -ef | grep your_script" then you need to kill it. So kindly add the '&' when you running the script.

# ./while_check.sh &

Here is the same loop as a script. Create file "while_check.sh" and put this in it:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do 
    echo "Hello World" # Substitute this line for whatever command you want.
    sleep 100
done

Then run it by typing bash ./while_check.sh &