Starting Programs on Boot/Reboot with CRON(8) and SCREEN(1)
When rebooting your PC or server, there may be interactive programs or
small scripts that you would want to have automatically load on boot,
such as chat clients or shell scripts. Even though you can manually
start them when you log in, it's more convenient to have these scripts
run automatically. Fortunately CRON(8) jobs make it possible to
automate processes in this sense, and tools like screen
can make it so you don't need to keep a terminal
window and SSH connection open 24/7. To start a program, you can
easily launch a program in screen with:
<![CDATA[screen -dmS <program> '<program>']]>
To launch the above script and/or example with a cron job (via
crontab) type crontab -e and add the following line:
<![CDATA[@reboot screen -dmS <program> '<program>']]>
Anton McClure /
anton@aperture.nonpaged.com