Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 21:12:15 -0600 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Replacing cron with mcron Message-ID: <20060210031215.GB2090@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20060210024758.GJ357@tigger.digitaltorque.ca> References: <18e02bd30602090028y10c0ae8eyd186ee790062c93a@mail.gmail.com> <20060210024758.GJ357@tigger.digitaltorque.ca>
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In the last episode (Feb 09), Michael P. Soulier said: > On 09/02/06 Iantcho Vassilev said: > > Has anyone tried this? I even think of proposing this to the base > > system - cron is such an old idea.. > > What does mcron offer? My main complaints about cron are: > > 1. Difficult to do refined timing, like execute on the first tuesday > of each month. I tend to use remind for this, by David Skoll. Something like that rule could be done with a bit of shell script: 0 0 0 0 2 [ $(date +%d) -le 7 ] && real_command For more compilcated rules you may be able to coax /usr/bin/calendar into doing the date math. Or have cron call calendar's date parser directly given a suitably-formatted crontab line. > 2. It leaves synchronization up to the app, so it will happily start > multiple instances of a job that's taking too long. > > To work around #2, I find something like daemontools or runit a nicer > way to solve the problem. Lockfile from the promail port works for me. You could probably use /usr/bin/lockf also. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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