cron alarm clock

[iknownotwhoiam]

i have my crontab set up to wake me up every morning by playing a song in iTunes. the only problem is i have to manually set which song i want it to play every night. is there any way that i can get cron to randomly pick a file to play from a list i have generated, such as read a file and pick one? if so, could someone please fill me in on how to do this. thanks.

[hydo]

Get thee to here: http://www.versiontracker.com/morein...d=13824&db=mac

[lethe]

what do you have in crontab? open song.mp3?

why don t you create a small applescript file that launches iTunes and starts playing at random, and put 'open applescript' in crontab

[scruffy]

also check versiontracker for "MP3 Alarm Clock". Nice little app, featureful and free.

[blb]

Or one line:

perl -e 'print "$ARGV[ int rand( scalar( @ARGV ) ) ]\n";' /path/to/mp3/*

[Koelling]

I'm confused, can some one help me out?

Where does this code stuff go? I know the CLI fairly well but I don't know scripts very well. obviously I can't just enter "perl -e 'print "$ARGV[ int rand( scalar( @ARGV ) ) ]\n";' /path/to/mp3/*" into cronnix so how do I make it work? Sorry if this is overly easy but the thread kinda jumped in above my head.

[BSDimwit]

crontab file...

type crontab -e (this will open you crontab file for editing)

then, depending on what time you want it to go off, you set the time like so

0 7 * * * /Users/yourname/scriptsdir/alarm.pl

Basically, you all the other stuff the other guys told you, would go into a script called alarm.pl, and the cron daemon will run it at 7am or whatever time you set it for. For more info on crontab do a man crontab... with that you should be able to figure out how to start stuff up at designated times.

Hope this answers your question.

[Koelling]

Thanks I have used it just crontab -e before but I'm not entirely proficient in it so I use cronnix which does the same job, just cocoaized. And that part about alarm.pl is exactly what I wanted to know.