# cron alarm clock



## iknownotwhoiam (May 12, 2002)

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.


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## hydo (May 12, 2002)

Get thee to here: http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13824&db=mac


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## lethe (May 12, 2002)

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


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## scruffy (May 12, 2002)

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


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## blb (May 12, 2002)

Or one line:

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


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## Koelling (May 14, 2002)

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.


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## BSDimwit (May 14, 2002)

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.


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## Koelling (May 16, 2002)

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.


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