Question about ports adding cronjobs

Pietro Cerutti gahr at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jun 17 23:02:43 UTC 2008


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David Hawthorne wrote:
| I have a piece of software I've been working on that gathers stats about
| the local host and shoves them into rrd files, with an accompanying web
| front-end page that generates pretty graphs from the RRDs on demand.  I
| have a package done up for it, and I'd like to add it to the ports tree
| eventually, but I'm stuck on how to get it to automagically add the
| cronjob to have the stats gathering script run every five minutes, and I
| don't know of any ports that add cronjobs off the top of my head to go
| look at.
|
| Is there an approved standard for doing this?  It doesn't have to be as
| root, either, it can run under a different user.  Any advice on how to
| get the port to add the user (and remove it properly when the port is
| deinstalled) properly and securely would be appreciated as well.

The only port which comes to my mind which goes near to what you want to
achieve is sysutils/bsdstats, which installs a script in periodic/monthly.
If running daily is enough you may want to look at that.

Another option would be to create a support script/daemon and place it
in rc.d. The script/daemon would then sit idle and wake up once every
<your preferred time here> and gather your statistics.

Third option: instruct the user (via a message at post-install stage) on
how to setup the cron job.

|
| Bonus points for providing the lines that would need to go into a
| CONTENTS file for the package, because that's what I'm working with
| right now for testing it on multiple machines.
|
| Thanks!


- --
Pietro Cerutti
gahr at FreeBSD.org

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