cron(8) improvement

Volodymyr Kostyrko c.kworr at gmail.com
Wed Nov 6 08:57:20 UTC 2013


05.11.2013 20:21, Mark Felder wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013, at 11:37, Nikolai Lifanov wrote:
>> On 11/05/13 12:31, Allan Jude wrote:
>>> This came up in discussion on IRC and I thought I should throw it at the
>>> list so I don't forget.
>>>
>>> A user was asking how to do what linux cron does, where there is a
>>> directory /etc/cron.d/ that packages and add files to to create crontabs.
>>>
>>> Making FreeBSD's cron (Vixie Cron) include /etc/cron.d/ and
>>> /usr/local/etc/cron.d/ in the /etc/crontab format seems like a very
>>> useful feature, especially for pkg(8) as it makes it easy and safe to
>>> programatically add and remove crontabs as part of a package.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Shouldn't we encourage packages to use periodic(8) when possible?
>>
>
> Yes but our default periodic configuration in /etc/crontab is only
> configured to be as granular as daily. If this is something that should
> run hourly or at very strange intervals then cron is a better choice.

So why we shouldn't add something like:

0 * * * * root periodic hourly
@reboot root periodic reboot

I already do this on some machines to take hourly and boot snapshots 
with zfSnap. And I think periodic is much better place for such tasks.

-- 
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.


More information about the freebsd-current mailing list