# Once a day activity

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 26, 2006, 4:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692 "2006-05-26T04:54:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/9dc877/32.png) [@joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe-dumoulin)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 4:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692/1 "2006-05-26T04:54:41Z")

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Say I want to send out an email once a day to people who’s name is  
“Bob”.

Would I use script/runner in conjunction with cron? Or is there  
another cool(er) way now?

Thanks,  
Joe

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**Author:** ![joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/9dc877/32.png) [@joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe-dumoulin)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 5:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692/2 "2006-05-26T05:07:09Z")

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I don’t like script/runner…Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think  
you  
can pass in a file to runner. I just use a normal cron script, hooked up  
to  
rails that loads all the models I’ll need. I’ve been doing it this way  
since  
pre-script/runner:

[http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToPopulateYourDbFromScript](http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToPopulateYourDbFromScript)

But there looks to be a better way of accomplishing it these days:

[http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Environments#script](http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Environments#script)  
[http://jaxn.org/blog/archives/1753-cron-jobs-in-rails](http://jaxn.org/blog/archives/1753-cron-jobs-in-rails)

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**Author:** ![joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/9dc877/32.png) [@joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe-dumoulin)\
**Post date:** [May 26, 2006, 6:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692/3 "2006-05-26T18:11:32Z")

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On May 25, 2006, at 8:04 PM, subimage interactive wrote:

> I don’t like script/runner…Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t  
> think you can pass in a file to runner. I just use a normal cron  
> script, hooked up to rails that loads all the models I’ll need.  
> I’ve been doing it this way since pre-script/runner:

Why the requirement to pass in a file?

I create a class in lib/ and invoke a class method.

script/runner -e production “Report.daily”

for instance. This command _is_ invoked by cron.

The nice thing about this is that it’s _just Rails_.

You don’t need to think about the environment for  
a moment. 🙂

–  
– Tom M.

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**Author:** ![joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/9dc877/32.png) [@joe-dumoulin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe-dumoulin)\
**Post date:** [May 29, 2006, 8:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/once-a-day-activity/61692/4 "2006-05-29T08:58:24Z")

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I perform a lot of maintenance…on a few of my sites it requires  
massive  
data download / import / crunching of massive XML/CSV files.

Couple that with old session cleanup, stats generation, etc & it’s a lot  
easier to maintain the code in one spot.

I suppose for simple things the runner might be a nice way to go.