Do shell accounts support these facilities?

[Guest]

I'm considering signing up for a hosted shell account. I need to run a shell script in background that will invoke ping, ftp, and mail a couple of times an hour. Are all these facilities (background in particular) available? And is there some Web page I haven't found that can answer this kind of detailed question?

Since I don't have a sonic.net username yet, I don't understand how I'll see responses to this query, so they can be mailed to admin.sonic@major2nd.com. Thanks.

[joemuller]

We do offer the capability for folks to run automated scripts via crontab on the shell server. We do ask that you be considerate of others and not run abusive or long-running tasks.

[kgc]

Just to clarify, running daemons on the shell server is explicitly prohibited but as Joe said, you a free to use cron to run something on a regular basis that doesn't use excessive resources on the system.