Re: soliciting opinions about potential new cron/at features.
On Sun, Feb 14, 1999 at 06:19:18PM -0600, flyingfish@rn082110.mrs.umn.edu wrote:
> That made me think about another question about cron/at,
> unrelated to the previous one, though. Is there a reason
> cron and at services are provided by two seperate daemons?
> Or is it just historically how things have always been
> done, or just that no one ever bothered to do it?
because they perform two separate functions - 'cron' does one thing
(regularly scheduled jobs), and 'at' does another ("once-off" jobs).
cron existed long before at did...and it probably isn't possible to add at's
features to cron without breaking compatibility with older crontabs -
compatibility is vital for something as standard and well-known as cron.
BTW, the first versions of at didn't have their own daemon...instead, a
program called atrun was executed from cron every minute.
craig
--
craig sanders
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