Simple job manager to run jobs sequentially in a Linux machine.

This simple command line tool was created to solve a problem similar to the ones described here:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72365506/how-to-change-a-sequence-of-bash-commands-while-running
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70946428/what-is-the-simplest-queue-job-manager-for-linux

Specifically, I wanted a way to execute long processing jobs sequentially and be able to modify the queue of upcomming jobs while a job was running.

Using --help will show the tool usage:

usage: runseq [-h] {run,add,list,ls,remove,rm,clear,cl} ...

runs jobs sequentially

options:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit

actions:
valid actions

{run,add,list,ls,remove,rm,clear,cl}
    run                 run jobs as they appear on queue; this command does not return
    add                 add a job to the queue
    list (ls)           list jobs in the queue
    remove (rm)         remove a job from the queue
    clear (cl)          remove all finished jobs from the queue

To use this tool, a job runner process must be started with the command run.

You may want to run the job runner in the background as follows:

nohup runseq run > jobs.log 2>&1 &

Upon the first interaction with the job queue, runseq will create a sqlite database named runseq.sqlite3 in the current directory. If you want to save the database somewhere else, then set the desired path in the environment variable RUNSEQ_DB before running any runseq command.

To submit jobs to the queue, use the add command. The first argument is the priority, which should be an integer; the remaining arguments form the command to be executed. Jobs will be executed in decreasing priority order. A shell will be spawn by the runner process and the command will be execute in the shell, which means that shell builtin commands are available as in the following example:

runseq add 1 sleep 5 '&&' echo hello 

(note the quoted && to avoid being interpreted by the shell where the runseq add command is being executed)

This program was created by Luís Gomes (https://research.variancia.com/) and is licensed under the GPLv3 license.