Re: Creating a randomized cron entry
On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 08:48:04PM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Justin Pryzby said:
> > On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 12:55:00PM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > >
> > > Probably the most portable way to handle it is to run the job from
> > > cron.daily, but call a wrapper script that sleeps for a random amount of
> > > time less than one day before runnign the actual job. For extra
> > > goodness, use a lock file so that if the last random sleep was 23 hours
> > > and 59 minutes, and the next one is 1 minute, you don't two jobs at
> > > once.
> > But that means essentially running a daemon for the package,
> > completely undermining the point of cron.
>
> Except that it doesn't fork to the background, close file descriptors,
> or handle requests. Basically it would do
>
> sleep $RANDOM
> touch lock.tmp
> if ln lock.tmp lock 2>/dev/null; then
> rm -f lock.tmp
> run program
> rm -f lock
> else
> rm -f lock.tmp
> fi
>
> Not much a daemon, if you ask me (unless your definition of daemon is
> anything that uses a timer and sleep).
Its a thing that I see in `ps aux` about which I shouldn't need to
worry => daemon :)
Seriously, though; Device And Extension MONitor.
Okay, so its only interfacing with the clock, and indirectly and
passively at that.
--
Clear skies,
Justin
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