From owner-freebsd-newbies Thu Apr 11 14:20:19 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from andrsn.stanford.edu (andrsn.Stanford.EDU [171.66.112.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CAB8337B405 for ; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 14:20:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost.stanford.edu [127.0.0.1]) by andrsn.stanford.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g3BLK0d83606; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 14:20:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 14:20:00 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson To: dillama Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The purpose of atrun In-Reply-To: <20020408190752.43CDE3E09@xmxpita.excite.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, dillama wrote: > > What is the actual purpose of atrun? Doesn't cron do the same thing? (I notice that atrun is called by crontab). > > In a base FreeBSD configuration, is anything run by atrun? > You can look at man atrun and man at. None of my installations have ever had anything installed in /var/at except empty directories, so I don't think there's anything in the base installation user "at" and therefore started by atrun. Like user crontabs, users can be allowed or denied the use of "at". The general impression one gets from reading the "at" manual page is that it may be useful for running some resource-intensive routines at specific times or times when resource use is low; but I think cron and crontab are more familiar to most people and more flexible, so atrun and at have fallen into dissuse. I suppose (if you really cared) you could disable atrun in crontab and find out if anything quits working, but somewhere there could be a script you expect to work that uses "at" and therefore depends on atrun. Annelise -- Annelise Anderson Author of: FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System for Your PC Available from: BSDmall.com and amazon.com Book Website: http://www.bittreepress.com/FreeBSD/introbook/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message