Schedule an imacro at a certain time

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Lucky75
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2010 7:59 am

Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Lucky75 » Tue Feb 02, 2010 8:03 am

Hey,

I was wondering if it were possible to schedule an imacro to run at a certain time. I know it's possible to do with a scheduled task (or a cron job for those of us on Linux), but I wanted to be able to do it from within firefox.

I was hoping to be able to run the macro, scrape the screen for a value (e.g. This action will time out in 10 hours) and then have it run itself again in the 10 hours. It seems to be possible to modify the macro itself, but I doubt I could modify the cron job or scheduled task from within firefox.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Daniel, Tech Support
Posts: 1483
Joined: Tue Jan 26, 2010 11:35 am

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Daniel, Tech Support » Tue Feb 02, 2010 12:09 pm

Hello,

What you could do is schedule firefox with cron or equivalent, and pass the url of the macro to Firefox as a parameter. You need to share the macro (edit-share) in order to achieve it. You may also want (or need) to use one of the short url services:
http://www.iopus.com/guides/best-short-url.htm

Here is an article about starting Firefox from the command line in that manner:
http://wiki.imacros.net/iMacros_for_Fir ... ne_Support
Allthough Windows commands are used, I believe Linux equivalent should simply have the correct Firefox path.
Daniel, iOpus Support
Lucky75
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2010 7:59 am

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Lucky75 » Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:02 pm

Hi, thanks for the reply. The problem is having iMacros modify the cron job based on what was scraped from the web page. I was under the impression that Firefox was more sandboxed than that?
Daniel, Tech Support
Posts: 1483
Joined: Tue Jan 26, 2010 11:35 am

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Daniel, Tech Support » Wed Feb 03, 2010 7:18 pm

Oh, I see. I am sorry, I missed that part of your initial question. Yes, unfortunately you are right, Firefox can hardly manipulate cron jobs.
With commercial iMacros you could have written a script and scheduled, that would run iMacros, extract the return values and then modify the cron job. But iMacros Scripting Edition for Linux is now in pre-release version. Allthough you can contact us here: http://www.iopus.com/service/contact/ if you are interested in it.

Another idea to consider would be the following (a bit complex though):
1. Write a script (e.g. Linux shell) that would run Firefox with the macro url as a parameter and then wait for some time
2. Have the macro get the value you need, then save it to a certain file
3. Have the script from 1. kill the firefox process, read the file that firefox created/appended and modify the cron job.
Daniel, iOpus Support
Lucky75
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2010 7:59 am

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Lucky75 » Thu Feb 04, 2010 4:02 am

Yeah. that's what I was thinking I'd have to do too. Maybe I'll just write a very specific firefox extension to do it haha :)

Thanks for the help
Daniel, Tech Support
Posts: 1483
Joined: Tue Jan 26, 2010 11:35 am

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by Daniel, Tech Support » Thu Feb 04, 2010 9:02 am

You are welcome!!
Actually, if you do write an extenstion, iMacros community will definitely benefit from it you if share it here ;)

Good luck with that!
Daniel, iOpus Support
techimac
Posts: 482
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2015 9:27 pm

Re: Schedule an imacro at a certain time

Post by techimac » Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:53 pm

How to schedule for Linux?

https://wiki.imacros.net/Linux#Scheduli ... Using_Cron

Can anyone tell the steps for scheduling js script in palemoon for Ubuntu?
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