Chapter 23. SCHEDULING WEBBOTS AND SPIDERS

Up to this point, all of our webbots have run only when executed directly from a command line or through a browser. In real-world situations, however, you may want to schedule your webbots and spiders to run automatically. This chapter describes methods for scheduling webbots to run unattended in a Windows environment. Most readers should have access to the scheduling tool I'll be using here.

If you are using an operating system other than Windows, don't despair. Most operating systems support scheduling software of some type. In Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X environments, you can always use the cron command, a text-based scheduling tool. Regardless of the operating system you use, there should also be a ...

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