Question

I want to repeatedly execute a function in Python every 60 seconds forever (just like an NSTimer in Objective C or setTimeout in JS). This code will run as a daemon and is effectively like calling the python script every minute using a cron, but without requiring that to be set up by the user.

In this question about a cron implemented in Python, the solution appears to effectively just sleep() for x seconds. I don’t need such advanced functionality so perhaps something like this would work

while True:     # Code executed here     time.sleep(60) 

Are there any foreseeable problems with this code?

Answer 1

If your program doesn’t have a event loop already, use the sched module, which implements a general purpose event scheduler.

import sched, time  def do_something(scheduler):      # schedule the next call first     scheduler.enter(60, 1, do_something, (scheduler,))     print("Doing stuff...")     # then do your stuff  my_scheduler = sched.scheduler(time.time, time.sleep) my_scheduler.enter(60, 1, do_something, (my_scheduler,)) my_scheduler.run() 

If you’re already using an event loop library like asyncio, trio, tkinter, PyQt5, gobject, kivy, and many others – just schedule the task using your existing event loop library’s methods, instead.