Topic: cron job?

[dave]

this is a very newbie question, but I was hoping one of the more seasoned bash people could help out. I want to keep one excel file in each of 4 ibays. Each different ibay will be a department, and the excel file will contain that department's schedule - with read/write permissions. I also want to have an ibay called 'schedules' and an automated way to copy each of the four files into the schedules ibay so they are always up to date (every 2 mins or so).

Any ideas on how to do this? Would a cron job be best or rsync? Also, what would happen if someone is using the excel file when the sync happens? would this mess with the file or kill the cron job? Any thoughts would be very helpful.

Thanks

[Daniel B. J.]

Look here:
http://www.aota.net/Script_Installation_Tips/cronhelp.php4

[Les Mikesell]

Don't forget that you still have all the native unix facilities available even though SME goes out of its way to hide them.  If you want the same file to appear in multiple ibays at the same time, you can just log into the server as root and make symlinks to the master copy in the appropriate places (cd ~ibay_name) .

[dave]

DaveLes Mikesell wrote:
>
> Don't forget that you still have all the native unix
> facilities available even though SME goes out of its way to
> hide them.  If you want the same file to appear in multiple
> ibays at the same time, you can just log into the server as
> root and make symlinks to the master copy in the appropriate
> places (cd ~ibay_name) .

thanks guys for the ideas so far. I tried symlinks and it is very easy, but if someone leaves a copy of excel open when the person who can write to the file writes to it, it comes back with a nasty error and will be a mess. They won't be able to update3 the file until *everyone* closes the document.

Any other ideas with how to update the files with a minimum of sync issues?

Thanks so much