CLI Setiathome

[ericmurphy]

I'm running the text-based version of setiathome because it seems to run significantly faster than the GUI screensaver version (and I like OS X's screensavers so much I prefer using them to sah). But I get tired of having to remember to restart setiathome every time I restart the system or even log out of the console. Is there a way to either a) set up setiathome so it will continue to run across logouts, or b) script it so it will restart automatically on my login?

setiathome lives in: /~eric/applications/seti/

the command invoking it is ./setiathome -verbose

[blb]

Here's how I do it:

First, I have a crontab entry,

44 * * * * /Users/blb/setiathome-3.03.powerpc-apple-darwin1.2/runseti

which makes sure it's running every hour (44 minutes past); since seti will only run one copy per directory, this won't kick off a new one every hour.

The runseti script is:

#!/bin/sh
#
cd /Users/blb/setiathome-3.03.powerpc-apple-darwin1.2/cpu0
nohup ./setiathome -nice 19 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
cd /Users/blb/setiathome-3.03.powerpc-apple-darwin1.2/cpu1
nohup ./setiathome -nice 19 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

I have two directories, one per CPU, where the setiathome executable is symlinked back to the directory where it actually resides. Of course, if you only run one copy, you don't have to do this.

[ericmurphy]

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about editing crontab to use the information yet, but my copy of OS X: the Complete Reference should be coming in tomorrow, and then I'll probably know enough about what I'm doing to do it.

[endian]

It's not a big deal, just editing a text file ( you could even do it with BBEdit )

Or you could use Cronnix, which is a GUI front end for the whole thing (serach on versiontracker)