On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 12:37:05PM +0100, Heiko Baums wrote: > Am Mon, 4 Jan 2010 10:51:29 +0100 > schrieb Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > > When a crontab is missed due to system downtime, sometimes you want > > the crontab to be done when the system boots up, but sometimes you do > > not want that at all. (eg a cleanup crontab that should never run > > during peak hours) > > > > would be nice if the choosen cron solution supports a certain marker > > per cron entry where you can define the behavior you want. > > That's exactly what you can do with fcron. In crontab you have to > explicitly tell fcron to run cronjobs which should have run during > downtime at bootup. If I recall correctly you have to prefix these > lines with an "@". Otherwise they are handled like in dcron. > > The scripts in /etc/cron.hourly etc. are executed at bootup if the > system was down when they should be running. But you can delete or chmod > 600 them or just comment the commands out. Hi, I'm the author/maintainer of yacron. It handles @daily, @weekly, @reboot etc. flags. It also handles more fine-grained instructions, like "try to run once a day, but only between the hours of 2-6 am" (that's not how you word the instruction, but that's what it does). It handles the /etc/cron.d scripts automatically. The /etc/cron.hourly etc scripts are handled the same way dcron handles them, by having lines like this in the system crontab: @hourly ID=sys-hourly cd / && /usr/bin/run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly fcron is more powerful but it's also a lot more complex, more complexity than I needed. I forked dcron into yacron because I thought with a little work I could add the extra features I needed but still keep to the tiny codebase. At this point, the upside of yacron is that simplicity (for however much you value it). The downside is---I'll be honest---not many people have been using it. But then I've had no problem reports, the code is really tiny and I tested/scrutinized my changes carefully, and the dcron starting point is quite mature. -- Jim Pryor profjim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
