Time & CmdSchedule

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

First, stupid me didn't make sure NTP started last time Vodka got
rebooted.  Hence it was a little over an hour behind (daylight savings).

Anyways, I restarted NTP which quickly brought it back in line.  I doubt
that it effected anyone/thing, but if you have any cron jobs running
around 20:50 to 21:50 and they didn't run, now you know why.

Also (and this is mostly for Jason, but anyone can chime in), I noticed
that you created the scheduling system very cron like.  Not being a cron
expert, I wondered what happens for something like:

01 01 2 * sun 

Now, Dec 2, 1999 is today (ie, not Sunday) and yet this cronjob would of
executed today (imperical evidence).  I thought that this was kinda
strange: Run on the second of each month and every Sunday at 1:01am.

So how do you want CmdSchedule.pl to act?  Like cron or different?  Will
your PHP tools allow someone to do that?  Is your PHP tool to manage the
table going to do bounds checking (Feb 31st for example)?  Jason, do you
really have time for this, or should it be delegated to someone else?

Also, do I need to support ranges and step values?

0,15,30,45 */2 2-5 * *

runs the command Mon-Fri at 0, 15, 30, and 45 minutes every other hour.

I also wondered about how to determine the difference between run once and
run many jobs?

* * * * * 

may mean run every minute of every day or it may mean "just run next time"
I think we should have a repeating field which is either an integer or *.
If a * then it runs until disabled/removed.  If an integer, it runs and
reduces the value by one.  When it reaches zero, it becomes disabled.


--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.
aka: aturner@vicinity.com, aturner@pobox.com, ion_beam_head@ashtech.net