Php – Supervisor – how to get a program to run at intervals of time

This:

date +%s 

will return the number of seconds since the epoch.

This:

date +%s%N

returns the seconds and current nanoseconds.

So:

date +%s%N | cut -b1-13

will give you the number of milliseconds since the epoch - current seconds plus the left three of the nanoseconds.

and from MikeyB - echo $(($(date +%s%N)/1000000)) (dividing by 1000 only brings to microseconds)

I don't think a command or shell builtin for this exists, as it's a trivial subset of what the Bourne shell for loop is designed for and implementing a command like this yourself is therefore quite simple.

Per JimB's suggestion, use the Bash builtin for generating sequences:

for i in {1..10}; do command; done

For very old versions of bash, you can use the seq command:

for i in `seq 10`; do command; done

This iterates ten times executing command each time - it can be a pipe or a series of commands separated by ; or &&. You can use the $i variable to know which iteration you're in.

If you consider this one-liner a script and so for some unspecified (but perhaps valid) reason undesireable you can implement it as a command, perhaps something like this on your .bashrc (untested):

#function run
run() {
    number=$1
    shift
    for i in `seq $number`; do
      $@
    done
}

Usage:

run 10 command

Example:

run 5 echo 'Hello World!'