Improve cron(8)

[Willem Jan Withagen]

Op 23 jun. 2014 om 21:06 heeft Alfred Perlstein <alfred at freebsd.org> het volgende geschreven:

> 
> On 6/23/14, 11:28 AM, Eitan Adler wrote:
>> On 23 June 2014 05:39, Willem Jan Withagen <wjw at digiware.nl> wrote:
>>> On 2014-06-23 4:08, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>>>> On 6/22/14 11:54 AM, John D. Hendrickson and Sara Darnell wrote:
>>>>> Eitan Adler wrote:
>>>>>> +arch since hackers@ seems to be silent.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 11 June 2014 23:56, Tomek Wałaszek <tmwalaszek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>>> I saw on the FreeBSD Ideas page topic about cron :).
>>>>>>> I've started updating the 'original' FreeBSD cron from sources to
>>>>>>> vixi cron
>>>>>>> 4.1. I think (well I hope :P) most of the features that were done in
>>>>>>> FreeBSD cron are now ported into vixi cron 4.1, there are unfortunately
>>>>>>> some missing features at the moment:
>>>>>>> - @every_second - this need to be done
>>>>>>> - -s and -o, in vixi cron 4.1 daylight time switches are enabled by
>>>>>>> default, at the moment there is no -s and -o options. So you need to
>>>>>>> remove
>>>>>>> '-s' from the cron rc script
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I've also added one feature from OpenBSD, crontab is poking cron using
>>>>>>> unix-domain socket so we don't need to have suid on crontab.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Path is in the attachment. I'm testing it on my FreeBSD box and it
>>>>>>> looks
>>>>>>> good but anyway don't try it on production machines :).
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> After the installation we have to do a few things:
>>>>>>> - Add crontab group
>>>>>>> - Change group to crontab on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>>>> - Add sticky bit on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>>>> - Add group write permissions on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> This is still work in progress but if someone could have a look on
>>>>>>> this and
>>>>>>> give me some feedback it would be great.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>>> Tomasz Walaszek
>>> 
>>> 
>>>>> you should up the version number or start your own renamed application
>>> 
>>>> Tomek, please don't let messages like this dissuade you from
>>>> participating.  Please do continue this work, it seems very promising.
>>>> Thank you!
>>>> 
>>>> I was myself looking forward to having these additions.  Very cool.
>>> 
>>> Hi Tomek,
>>> 
>>> One of the things I like in some of the other cron's is the possibility to
>>> add files to something like: /var/cron.d.
>>> This as contract to /var/cron/tabs, where files need to <username> and are
>>> executed under that users privilidges.
>>> 
>>> Reason that this would be convenient is that tools like puppet don't need to
>>> start editing files to remove crontab lines. Which IMHO is always more hairy
>>> then just adding/deleting/updating a file called:
>>>         /var/cron.d/tool-ABC.cron
>> This is absolutely useful and has existed in every large scale
>> envrionment I know of.
> Agreed, it would be a huge step forward for FreeBSD.
> 

IT is more or less how most tools operate now a days.

- global config file
    Aka /etc/crontab
- local config file 
    Aka /etc/crontab.local
- directory (1 or more)
    Aka /var/cron/tabs with users
    And /var/cron.d for separate files with cron content.

--WjW