If you want to avoid "drifting", meaning you want the command to execute every N seconds regardless of how long the command takes (assuming it takes less than N seconds), here's some bash that will repeat a command every 5 seconds with one-second accuracy (and will print out a warning if it can't keep up):
PERIOD=5
while [ 1 ]
do
let lastup=`date +%s`
# do command
let diff=`date +%s`-$lastup
if [ "$diff" -lt "$PERIOD" ]
then
sleep $(($PERIOD-$diff))
elif [ "$diff" -gt "$PERIOD" ]
then
echo "Command took longer than iteration period of $PERIOD seconds!"
fi
done
It may still drift a little since the sleep is only accurate to one second. You could improve this accuracy by creative use of the date command.