nq VS cache_box_rb

If you want something quick and janky, I suggest nq. It's stupidly simple and lightweight; it just requires that everyone is running as the same user. And only lets exactly one job of any kind run in a given queue. There's basically zero configuration; just nq , and it'll either start running , or will wait its turn.

For your ad-hoc uses, I would introduce nq. It's an extremely lightweight queuing system, which gives you two things with minimal overhead:

I'm already aware of alternatives which I will consider (at, nq, snooze, but I still want an accurate lightweight CLI stopwatch/timer app and the script otherwise works well--this is more of an exercise on understanding background processes and could be handy in other scripts. Or if the attempt is considdered hacky and ill-advised, I'm curious of an alternative implementation. I just feel nothing is more simple than a very lightweight C-based timer app that exits 0 after specified time has elapsed and don't want to run a cron job or even a while sleep 1 loop for a reminder (sleep isn't even a builtin...).

Interesting project. Unfortunate that its name conflicts with one of nq’s executables (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nq), but I’m not sure anything can be done about it.

nq

Slightly related to this, I'm building a ruby gem that lets you create such a workflow:

https://gitlab.com/sdwolfz/cache_box_rb

I guess some slight tweaks for task persitance and a CLI wrapper for it could let you achieve this (although I don't leverage Ractors so no true parallelism yet).

Anyway, it still does not have an "official" release, nor a stable API, although the code works well and it's fully tested, as far a I can tell. I might consider providing such wrapper myself in the future as I can definitely see it's utility, but time is short nowadays.