[Sussex] Regular scheduled jobs?

[John D.]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 19:07 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
-----%<-----
> Installing 'anacron' would probably help.

Suprisingly enough, it appears to have made a difference already
because "emerge anacron" has installed vixie-cron as a dependency of
anacron. So I now presume that the cron that already seemed to be
installed, must have been a basic/normal version
> anacron (as people have pointed out) is just a means of extending cron
> to perform tasks when your machine may be turned off.  Of course,
> there's nothing to say that using anacron in your situation is any
> better than using vixie-cron (what you're reading about with "man
> crontab").  To be perfectly honest, I'd go with vixie-cron for the
> time-being, and see my very first reply to this thread for pointers.

I also now get something when I try "man crontab" (believe it or not, I
get the man page :D though I was obviously wrong, thinking that all man
pages were installed when I started looking into this).

Richie made a valid attempt to explain cron etc, at tonights moot.
Though if I just put in "crontab -l" I get

bash-2.05b$ crontab -l
bash: /usr/bin/crontab: Permission denied
bash-2.05b$

but if I try to do that as su'd to root, I get

bash-2.05b# crontab -l
no crontab for root
bash-2.05b#

Hum! I'll have to dig out that link for "how to decypher man pages" that
I've got tucked away somewhere.
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> But you have enough interest to ask what one is.  That's a start.  :)  A
> shell script is (usually) a collection of commands denoted by the very
> first line in the file, which will look like:
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> 
> or:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> 
> You've seen and use examples of shell scripts everyday without realising
> it, John.

Yes, things starting with those as first line, do look familiar. I
suspect that I'm going to have to see if there's any books that explain
shell scripting in a very basic way (dummies guide to.... if "they" do
one, or something similar)


> > I did find a howto at
> > http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html for cron,
> > but again, I get lost as soon as the "technoblurb" starts!
> 
> What is it you don't understand?
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I suspect that I was getting rather lost, because it went off into
technospeak at quite an early stage - and not being able to find
anything on the system that remotely resembled what the howto was
talking about, threw me somewhat!

I'll have to revisit that link and see If I can follow it now that the
anacron and vixie-cron are installed (but not tonight, the "old barnet"
is still buzzing with too much other stuff at the moment :-P like
sleep).

Thanks again for the response Thomas, mucho appreciado, as they say in
"Spanglish"!

regards

John D.