vcron

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

Soo.... Can anybody give me a good discription of how to use cron?

The man page for vcron is.... lacking, to say the least.

I swear there used to be a doc on using cron in gentoo... But I can't find it.

tukem · Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2003 7:45 pm Post subject:

I don't what kind of information you were looking for but I think "man 5 crontab" gives fairly decent information on the usage.

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

Ok... that helps a little... Most of that stuff I had found out though.
And for as long as I've used linux it's surprising that I've never figured out putting the number in the man statement to get the different man page if there is more than one until now

Okay, what I can't seem to figure out is... What is the whole cron.daily cron.hourly stuff?

tukem · Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2003 3:14 pm Post subject:

I guess you have already figured out what those cron.daily, cron.weekly, ... are but everybody else might not know.

File /etc/crontab is the system level crontab file. Generally system level scripts are run from here but Gentoo has a bit different appoach. The crontab file appears to contain a line that runs a script /etc/sbin/run-crons every fifteen minutes. This script then checks the directories cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly for scripts to be executed

With this system it's not necessary to learn how the actual cron program works. Adding a file containing desired script into correct directory is all that is needed.

Seth · Apprentice Joined: 25 May 2002 Posts: 156 Location: U.S.

tukem · Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2003 4:26 pm Post subject:

Well for that kind of use cron.daily, weekly, monthly is too unflexible. But in workstation use where the computer isn't necessarily on at 3:00 am on the first day of the month this system works. The script is simply run when the computer is turned on again.

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

ronmon · Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2003 12:50 am Post subject:

Both /bin/sh and /bin/bash scripts will work. Did you remember to set it executable?

gzaector · Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2003 1:46 am Post subject:

if someone didnt want to use the whole hour/day/week/month system, couldnt they just take the enteries out of /etc/crontab, then add whatever they wanted into /etc/crontab?

ronmon · Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2003 1:57 am Post subject:

You can just add them to crontab without removing the others. Like this one for gentoo-stats:

drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE