You're trading efficiency for reliability and/or time. Cron will happily make sure your program runs, it logs any problems, and it is the 'standard'.

IOW your small gain in efficiency will cost you time to develop (logging, rewriting for loop, debugging). Then it will cost your company when you leave and someone has to figure out what job is running after he/she has already looked in the crontab.

Is this program causing a problem? Have you done 'ps' or 'top' on it? Is it using too much memory? These are questions you should ask before you take something out of cron.

Don't reinvent good wheels

grep

grep> chown linux:users /world

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