updating cron and atrun

[Cy Schubert]

On February 9, 2020 2:10:35 AM PST, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>--------
>In message <97A66670F59C9C626B5090E3 at triton.njm.me.uk>, "N.J. Mann"
>writes:
>>Hi,
>>
>>On Saturday, February 08, 2020 19:30:31 +0000 Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks for looking into this.
>>> 
>>> Is at(1) something people actually use these days, or should it be
>>> disabled by default ?
>>
>>I do.  I use it to run various homebrew scripts in response to
>external
>>events.  I needed a delay (sometime minutes, sometimes hours) between
>>the event and the response and at(1) was a perfect fit.
>
>Right, it is absolutely useful to have, if you need it, and it should
>not be removed.
>
>But if, as I suspect, the vast majority of FreeBSD pointlessly add 
>288 lines to /var/log/cron every day, without anybody ever using the
>at(1)
>command, maybe we should disable it to save power and disk-wear ?

I use at at(1) and batch(1) all the time, on FreeBSD and other platforms. Most people I know, professionally, don't know about these commands. They add the 288 lines to cron every day. They're not interested when I explain to them a better way to do it. What's worse, at $JOB, at(1) and batch(1) have been uninstalled on Linux (while they remain on the other platforms) because the senior Linux person (who left our employ three weeks ago) felt people didn't understand the utilities and, they could add anything to cron for a day if they wanted. 

The idea of removing at(1) and batch(1) is not new. People generally have no idea what they do and people are unwilling to chance using them or learning something new because they're busy working. That's my experience. 



-- 
Pardon the typos and autocorrect, small keyboard in use. 
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX: <cy at FreeBSD.org> Web: https://www.FreeBSD.org

The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.

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