Define a Increment variable in shell script that increments on every cronjob - bash

Question

I have searched the forum couldn't find one.can we define a variable that only increments on every cronjob run?
for example:
i have a script that runs every 5minutes so i need a variable that increments based on the cron run
Say if the job ran 5minutes for minutes. so 6 times the script got executed so my counter variable should be 6 now
Im expecting in bash/shell
Apologies if a duplicate question
tried:
((count+1))

Answer 1

You can do it this way:
create two scripts: counter.sh and increment_counter.sh
add execution of increment_counter.sh in your cron job
add . /path/to/counter.sh into /etc/profile or /etc/bash.bashrc or wherever you need
counter.sh
declare -i COUNTER
COUNTER=1
export COUNTER
increment_counter.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo "COUNTER=\$COUNTER+1" >> /path/to/counter.sh

Answer 2

The shell that you've run the command in has exited; any variables it has set have gone away. You can't use variables for this purpose.
What you need is some sort of permanent data store. This could be a database, or a remote network service, or a variety of things, but by far the simplest solution is to store the value in a file somewhere on disk. Read the file in when the script starts and write out the incremented value afterwards.
You should think about what to do if the file is missing and what happens if multiple copies of the script are run at the same time, and decide whether those are situations you care about at all. If they are, you'll need to add appropriate error handling and locking, respectively, in your script.

Answer 3

Wouldn't this be a better solution?
...to define a file under /tmp, such that a command like:
echo -n "." > $MyCounterFilename
Tracks the number of times something is invoked, in my particular case of app.:
#!/bin/bash
xterm [ Options ] -T "$(cat $MyCounterFilename | wc -c )" &
echo -n "." > $MyCounterFilename
Because i had to modify the way xterm is invoked for my purposes and i found already that having opened many of these concurrently one waste less time if knowing exactly what is running on each one by its number (without having to cycle alt+tab and eye inspect through everything).
NOTE: /etc/profile, or better either ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile needs only a env. variable name defined containing the full path to your counter file.
Anyway, if you dont like the idea above, experiments might be performed to determine a) 1st time out of all that /etc/profile is executed since machine is powered on and system boots. 2) Wether /etc/profile is executed or not, and how many times (Each time we open an xterm?, for instance). ... thereafter the same sort of testing for the other dudes lesser general than /etc one.