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Given a commodity PC, we would like to use it to execute some tasks in the background round the clock.

Basically, we would like to have commands like:

add-task *insert command here*

list-tasks

remove-task(s)

The added tasks should simply be put in a queue and executed one after another in the background (keeping running after logout of the shell).

Is there any simple script/program that does this?

There's a standard batch command that does more or less what you're after. More precisely, batch executes the jobs when the system load is not too high, one at a time (so it doesn't do any parallelization). The batch command is part of the at package.

echo 'command1 --foo=bar' | batch      

echo 'command2 "$(wibble)"' | batch

at -q b -l              # on many OSes, a slightly shorter synonym is: atq -q b

at -q b -r 1234         # Unschedule a pending task (atq gives the task ID)

There are lots of queuing systems, but the are frequently very specialized.

You might look into the at scheduler. It's like cron in some ways but it is setup more like a queue for one time jobs than for repeat jobs. It can "schedule" things on criteria other than time, such as system load or sequence of jobs.

Your favorite distro will almost certainly have packages for it.

Another solution is to use lpd, and create a custom "print driver" that runs your jobs. A friend helped me work this out when I had a similar request. Make a script like this, and put it in /tmp/batch.sh:

#!/bin/bash



TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/XXXX)

exec <"$6"

cat - > $TMPFILE

chmod a+x $TMPFILE

$TMPFILE

rm -f $TMPFILE

Then run:

lpadmin -p batch1 -E -P /tmp/batch.sh

That starts a queue, and you can create more by using other names instead of batch1. Add a job with:

lp -d batch1 /path/to/jobscript

Manage jobs with lpq, lprm, and lpstat. If you want more flexibility with passing arguments to your jobs, you can make the batch.sh script fancier.

(I tried batch before going down this route, but either it doesn't work as a queue on OSX, or I was using it wrong.)

I notice this question is several years old, so it may not help the original poster, but it may help someone else.

First: "task spooler" is the answer. It's pretty powerful and Fedora at least has it.

But a lot of the servers I use, I can't install arbitrary packages without a lot of hassle, so I need something that is ideally pure bash (or perl, or such).

After struggling with this for a while, I came up with a pure bash implementation that appears to work fine so far. You can find it at https://github.com/sitaramc/bq.

It's just one bash script so installation is trivial. However, it punts your second and third requirements (but it should be trivial to implement those too).

The script is liberally commented and you should be able to review it in a few minutes if you wish to.