Linux: What should I use to run terminal programs based on a calendar system?

Sorry about the really ambiguous question, I really have no idea how to word it though hopefully I can give you more detail here.

I am developing a project where a user can log into a website and book a server to run a game for a specific amount of time. When the time is up the server stops running and the players on the server are kicked off. The website part is not a problem, I am doing this in PHP and everything works. It has a calendar system to book a server and can generate config files based on what the user wants.

My question is what should I use to run the specific game server on the开发者_高级运维 linux box with those config files at the correct time? I have got this working with bash scripts and cron, but it seems very un-elegant. It literally uses FTP to connect to the website so it can download all the necessary config files and put them in a folder for that game and time. I was wondering if there was a better way of doing this. Perhaps writing a program in C, but I am not sure how to go about doing this.

(I am not asking for someone to hold my hand and tell me "write this code here", just some ideas of a better way of approaching this problem)

Thanks so much guys!

Edit: The webserver is a totaly different machine. I would theoreticaly like to have more than one game server where each of them "connects" (at the moment FTP) to the webserver, gets a file saying what it has to do at a specific time and downloads any associated files then disconnects.

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I think at is better suited for running one time jobs than cron.

For a better approach for the downloading files etc, you should give more details on your setup (like, the website and the game server, are they on the same machine? Or the same network? etc etc.

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You need a distributed task scheduler. With that, you can:

1. Schedule command "X" to be run at a certain time.
2. Specify the machine (or ask it to pick a machine from a pool of available machines)

Webserver would send request to this scheduler via command line or via web service when user selects a game server and a time.

You can have a look at : http://www.acelet.com/super/SuperWatchdog/index.html

EDIT :

One more option :http://jobscheduler.sourceforge.net/