Tcsh periodic requires carriage return

Hello All,

My first post on this forum. I am using cygwin to help me with some routine jobs on my laptop, with tcsh as my shell. I need to copy a set of files from one directory to a network drive every minute. So I have

set tperiod = 1
alias periodic 'cp *.txt /cygdrive/z/Data'

Unfortunately, it doesn't execute on its own unless I give carriage return. What am I missing?

Thanks,

PS: I know about cron and am using it for some other purposes. But it had trouble with network drive, so thought of using tcsh feature