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Re: cron jobs more often than daily



On 07-Jan-1998 11:35:45, Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de> wrote:
> On 6 Jan 1998, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> > schwarz@monet.m.isar.de (Christian Schwarz)  wrote:
> > 
> > >   (b) We set up a certain directory (say /usr/lib/cronjobs) where each
> > >       package can install its own crontab file (/usr/lib/cronjobs/foo).
> > 
> > Use /etc/cron.often (or similar name). It will contain crontabs, not  
> > executable scripts. All of them will be conffiles, so the sysadmin can  
> > change them without fear of updates.

This seems to be the consensus, and it's my favorite too, and looks to
be easy to implement (especially given the nice way that cron reads/parses
crontabs).

Here's the proposal:

In addition to reading /etc/crontab, the cron daemon will also
read each file in /etc/cron.d (chosen for similarity to init.d). Each
of the files in cron.d is considered a crontab "fragment", and should
be formatted exactly as /etc/crontab (i.e. with the username specified).
The end result will be just as if cron read the result of 

cat /etc/crontab /etc/cron.d/*

Packages requiring faster than daily intervals, or irregular
intervals, should place the appropriate crontab fragment in
/etc/cron.d/packagename. This file should be marked as conf file, so
that the sysadmin may change it. The files in /etc/cron.d will be
checked for changes (via stat()) every minute, just as /etc/crontab is;
therefore there is no need for action in the postinst.


I should be able to get this out this weekend.

steve

-- 
Steve Greenland


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