Crontab job as a service
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I have a script that pulls some data from a web service and populates a mysql database. The idea is that this runs every minute, so I added a cron job to execute the script.

However, I would like the ability to occasionally suspend and re-start the job without modifying my crontab.

What is the best practice for achieving this? Or should I not really be using crontab to schedule something that I want to occasionally suspend?

I am considering an implementation where a global variable is set, and checked inside the script. But I thought I would canvas for more apt solutions first. The simpler the better - I am new to both scripting and ruby.