The task scheduler is crap and I am having a hard time finding a nice scheduler. Any ideas?

I think there is "crond" for windows which I have used.  Also, do you really need a GUI for cron.

Yes.  Cron is not all that intuitive.

I don't need a GUI, but it's useful for others. Though I agree with muppet. Every time I use cron I have reread the man page.

"The task scheduler is crap" - and why is that? It seems to run the jobs I want it to...

> why is that?

Where's the output of the command? The status of the command? I want to schedule something every hour, but with that duration field you need to schedule a duration longer than the interval.

Years ago I had to create some Windows executables to run under Task Scheduler.

For some reason I can't remember, I couldn't log out of the machine, I had to lock it. Otherwise, one (or all? can't remember) of the scheduled jobs wouldn't run.

Not really sure that's an issue inherent to Task Scheduler, though.

>>For some reason I can't remember, I couldn't log out of the machine, I had to lock it. Otherwise, one (or all? can't remember) of the scheduled jobs wouldn't run.

you should run the tasks on a system account.

What I don't like is the way the configuration options change on you _after_ you make a scheduled task. The wizard does not show you everything.

As far as output/status goes, why not just write files? In a *nix based system, wouldn't that pretty much be how it would be done anyway? Piping output from a console app ain't that rough.

"I want to schedule something every hour, but with that duration field you need to schedule a duration longer than the interval."

Have you actually tried it?.  Set the Repeat task: Every 1 hour. The Until: duration is only used if you want to kill the task after a certain amount of time.

As far as output / status of the program that is a separate issue.  You could set up a batch file to pipe the result to a file for instance.

> duration is only used if you want to kill the task after a certain amount of tim

It will not let met set a duration shorter than the interval. Or I wouldn't ask.

> As far as output / status of the program that is a separate issue

How is it separate? The nicer GUI tools give you the output and the status from each invocation.

"duration shorter than the interval"

Jesus Christ you are dense - the duration is the elapsed time to repeat the task.

So if you want to run a job every hour but only between 9-5. You set the start time to 9:00am, set it to repeat every hour and then set the duration for 8 hours.

Use google for f*cks sake - there are lots of task schedulers out there.

But if you can't even figure out how Windows Task Scheduler works I think you might have other problems...

> Jesus Christ you are dense -

There's no need to pray. It won't let me escape that stupid screen without entering a certain type of value.

"There's no need to pray."  Whaa??? - are you sure you are not RickBot version 2.0 ??

> are you sure you are not RickBot version 2.0 ??

Are you sure have any sort of common western referents in your symbolic manipulation system?

You are spouting gibberish again - time for a reboot?

"Jesus Christ you are dense"

Wow. That was completely uncalled for. I can't imagine calling someone who knows the task scheduler and its shortcomings (even if there is a misunderstanding) "dense"

SoP - duration isn't the duration of the task itself; it's the length of time you want to run the jobs.

So it's Weds and I want to run a job every hour until next Tuesday. Duration: 7 days.

Does that help?

>>
"The task scheduler is crap" - and why is that? It seems to run the jobs I want it to...

Sometimes, it just doesn't.
I've had scheduled jobs running for months and then just stop running with no error message or anything to go by.  Deleting the task from Windows scheduler and re-adding it fixes things so it's not the task itself.  Windows task scheduler is kind of flakey.

Maybe you set a duration? [g]

Ha, possible I guess.  But the default is no end date, so it would be hard to do by accident.