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Terminal: Continuously check mail, but not too often

I have a command `check_mail` that checks my mail. I have it configured to run hourly because I don't want to hammer the server too much.

But, sometimes I am really at the edge of my seat for a response from someone, so I run it more often since I don't want to wait up to an hour.

Surely there's a way in the terminal to say "run this command every minute"?

I know about `watch`. But my mail script can take some time to complete. So for example if I make it run every 120 secs, and one time the script takes 130 secs, I definitely do not want `watch` to create a second parallel instance of the mail checker.

Does `watch` already take care of this, or is there some other tool I can use?