Re: crontabs + m4 = ?
Steve Greenland writes:
> On 14-Jan-1998 00:30:49, Topi Miettinen <Topi.Miettinen@ml.tele.fi> wrote:
> > How about modifying cron to read its files using a preprocessor, like m4?
> > That would be a more flexible solution than fixed "include *" or
> > "cat *>crontab" and it wouldn't be much harder to do.
>
> It's a neat idea, but completely incompatible with other crons. Nothing
Of course, but so is the proposed new built-in "include".
> prevents a sysadmin from using a crontab.m4 to generate /etc/crontab.
Which would mean that any changes to /etc/crontab get overwritten (which
was one of the problems in the first place).
> I also have a hard time imagining any real use for it that wouldn't be
> better done in program that cron executes rather than cron itself. Of
> course, my imagination may be faulty.
Having the cron job check whether it should run or not isn't very
beautiful. Exaggerating: Why not run all jobs at 5 min intervals and have
them all check that too?
What I'm saying is that with equal incompatiblity and coding effort
compared to other proposals, we could get much more functionality.
-Topi
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