/etc/daily.local and sim. never run

[Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos]

Hi,

I just noticed that scripts in /etc/daily.local, /etc/weekly.local, etc,
never run.
The reason seems to be that the /etc/periodic/daily/999.local and similar
scripts use "for script in $daily_local". Because the variable $daily_local
is initialized in /etc/defaults/periodic.conf to /etc/daily.local, which
actually does not contain a wildcard, the for loop step executes only once
with the variable script bound to "/etc/daily.local". There's no iteration
over scripts contained in /etc/daily.local.

I have no idea when this might have gotten broken. The 999.local scripts
date back to 2001. It's curious that no one has noticed.
Perhaps most people just use the crontab or put their scripts directly into
/etc/periodic/daily, etc.

Anyway, scheduling things in crontabs and the like is not very good when
the system is not always on.
Since UNIX is no longer such a "time sharing system" and many people run
desktops and part-time servers, wouldn't it be desirable to have a periodic
job scheduling mechanism that would reliably run jobs when a given amount
of time (uptime or not) had passed?

Greetings,

Miguel Ramos
Lisboa