Re: Time & CmdSchedule

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Daniel E. Markle wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 02:17:35PM -0800, Aaron Turner wrote:
> > But, there is some functionality that will be lost by using native cron,
> 
> What?  Be more specific, I have some ideas that can offset some of these.

Repeat X times then disable.
dynamic email address to send output/errors to
Ability to run reports (failures, sucesses, etc)
Keeping track of cronjobs will require a DB to keep track of what's in the
crontab file anyways or you have to do some "horrible" hack with comments:

* * * * * <do something> # comments here 

I don't think writing this script is very difficult, and there are some
advantages to a DB. 

> > that I'm not sure we're willing to give up.  Also maintaining the crontab
> > file will be a pain in the butt (it's going to get really big)
> 
> The whole point isn't to maintain the crontab manually, that's what the
> scripts do.  I don't know what cron's performance is on really large crontabs,
> I'll look into it.

Actually writing the scripts to maintain the crontab file would be more
complicated than maintaing the DB table.  you've got file locking issues,
job status tracking, etc that are hard to impliment correctly with
crontab.  The only "hard" part of the DB way is writing a time/date parser
to support the / and - and , operators.  I'd rather do that IMHO.

--
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