I was curious how you can run a python script in the background, repeating a task every 60 seconds. I know you can put something in the background using &, is that effeictive for this case?
I was thinking of doing a loop, having it wait 60s and loading it again, but something feels off about that.
I think your idea is pretty much exactly what you want. For example:
import time
def do_something():
with open("/tmp/current_time.txt", "w") as f:
f.write("The time is now " + time.ctime())
def run():
while True:
time.sleep(60)
do_something()
if __name__ == "__main__":
run()
The call to time.sleep(60) will put your program to sleep for 60 seconds. When that time is up, the OS will wake up your program and run the do_something() function, then put it back to sleep. While your program is sleeping, it is doing nothing very efficiently. This is a general pattern for writing background services.
To actually run this from the command line, you can use &:
$ python background_test.py &
When doing this, any output from the script will go to the same terminal as the one you started it from. You can redirect output to avoid this:
$ python background_test.py >stdout.txt 2>stderr.txt &