Re: missed cron jobs
On May 15, E.L. Meijer (Eric) wrote
> This morning I worked on my home debian system at a very early time
> (for me, that is), from 6:30 a.m on. All of a sudden my hard disk
> begins to crackle, opening a new window takes longer than normal (I
> have a lowly 486DX100), and after starting top I see that `nobody' is
> running `find' (it's amazing, isn't it ? :). I soon realized that this
> was cron running the cron.daily scripts. I never thought about this
> before, but it may very well have been the first time these scripts
> were run, my computer at home is usually switched off at this time.
> Now comes my question:
>
> Could this be harmful?
Well, AFAIK it's not going to harm your system, but it does fairly useful
things like rotating logfiles and removing old catpages. It also rebuilds
the dwww cache if you have that installed, and checks some security
things (most of which are more useful if you're on a network).
> I think a lot of people using linux at home don't leave their computer
> switched on continuously. Has anyone ever thought of a system that
> would spot missed cron events and run them at a later time? Would this
> be useful at all?
See the `anacron' package, which does just this. It can be run at bootup
and from cron, and if it hasn't been run yet that day, executes the
scripts. So you can turn your machine on, and go and have breakfast, and
come back when it's done! (I too have a lowly 486 :)
&E
--
Andy Mortimer, andy.mortimer@poboxes.com
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