updating cron and atrun
Cy Schubert
Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com
Sun Feb 9 13:50:40 UTC 2020
In message <55C50689-6DA8-4D44-92BB-72C38B54AC96 at cschubert.com>, Cy
Schubert wr
ites:
> On February 9, 2020 2:10:35 AM PST, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wr
> ote:
> >--------
> >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. Mos
> t people I know, professionally, don't know about these commands. They add th
> e 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 un
> installed on Linux (while they remain on the other platforms) because the sen
> ior Linux person (who left our employ three weeks ago) felt people didn't und
> erstand 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 s
> omething new because they're busy working. That's my experience.
Looking at the wiki page, integration of atrun into cron as NetBSD has
done, is obvious. Solaris, HP-UX and every other platform I've used (which
is no longer produced today) have had the atrun functionality performed by
cron itself. This is a no brainer.
--
Cheers,
Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com>
FreeBSD UNIX: <cy at FreeBSD.org> Web: http://www.FreeBSD.org
The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.
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