Re: [DRAFT #2] Cron jobs

[Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com>]

Kurt Wall <kwall@xmission.com> writes:

> Are we still going on the basis that /etc/cron.d are one-liners
> executing scripts in /etc/<period>?

Huh?

Assuming you meant to say /etc/cron.<period> instead of /etc/<period>,
the 2nd draft covers this question, but I'll answer it here anyway.

/etc/cron.d/<package-name> and /etc/cron.<period>/<package-name> are
orthogonal.  The first is a crontab configuration file.  The second is
a script.  Another way to think of it is that all of the files in
/etc/cron.d are logically concatenated and appended to /etc/crontab at
runtime by the cron daemon.

The executables run by /etc/cron.d/<package-name> are located in
/opt/<package-name>.  Multiple lines in /etc/cron.d/<package-name> are
okay since /etc/cron.d/<package-name> is in the format of
/etc/crontab.  Otherwise, packages couldn't run more than one job when
using /etc/cron.d/<package-name>.

In another message, Kurt Wall <kwall@xmission.com> writes:

> My vote is "once per day", with day defined as the 24-hour period
> between 00:00 and 23:59 UTC.

That could mean that Monday's script is run at 23:58 and Tuesday's at
00:02 -- 4 minutes passing between the two "daily" runs.

I think the definition I'd like to go with is that scripts located in
/etc/cron.<period> are run once per <period>, between the beginning of
the <period> and the end of the <period>, using local time.  In
addition, any two subsequent runs of the scripts located in
/etc/cron.<period> should start at least (0.5 * <period>) apart from
each other.

As a result, scripts located in /etc/cron.<period> should not require
a significant portion of the <period> to complete.

- Dan