cron question / process queue

[Michael ODonnell]

Just thinking out loud here, but one extremely low-tech way to do it
might be to have your daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs create a work queue
by depositing disposable copies of the desired scripts into a special
directory with names guaranteed to be sequential and unique (like,
say, /yourQueueDir/`date '+%Y%m%d%H%M%S'`-$$+duration.sh) and then have
an hourly cron job process that queue at the times you deem suitable.
If you encode rough guesses about durations into the script names (or
maybe have multiple queue dirs?)  your queue-processor might then be able
to make decisions about whether it was practical to start a given job.
Each script would be deleted upon completion.