Do something every minut in shell

Recently I've needed to do some statistic based on apache log file. I've wanted statistic to be update every minute and want to use only shell.

The first idea was cron.  Sounds nice but there is small problem. I want to be flexible. In theory I can add a job to crontab in the moment I want to start it and remove it (comment out) after finishing, but it's ideal.

No cron, so maybe sleep, especially sleep 60.... But there is another problem. My scripts runs few seconds, so after few minutes (approx. 60/time my scripts runs) I'll have a gap in results.

No cron, no sleep. I needed another direction. Recently I've been playing a bit with data formats. I write a bit of code and after few minutes – volia – I had a working scripts.

#!/bin/sh

min=`date  "+%M"`

while [ 1 ]
do
        ~/test.sh
        while (($min==`date  "+%M"`))
        do
                sleep 10
        done
        min=`date  "+%M"`
done 

One more thing which might be interesting for some. I used infinite loop based on  this blog entry.