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From: Mike Pritchard <mpp@mpp.minn.net>
Message-Id: <199508141756.MAA25312@mpp.minn.net>
Subject: Re: bin/683: cron(8)
To: wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de (Wolfram Schneider)
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 12:56:24 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: wollman@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu, wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de,
        FreeBSD-bugs@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199508141725.TAA18350@caramba.cs.tu-berlin.de> from "Wolfram Schneider" at Aug 14, 95 07:25:51 pm
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Wolfram Schneider wrote:
> Garrett Wollman writes:
> ><<On Mon, 14 Aug 1995 17:57:01 +0200, Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de> said:
> >
> >>> You missed the point.  It is none of cron's business to be parsing
> >                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >>> shell command lines, period.
> >   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >
> >You are still missing the point.
> 
> You too. Cron(8) is for execute *commands*, not execute your favourite
> *shell command* lines. 
> 
> Starting a shell is a feature. It is your own risk if
> SHELL=/usr/bin/perl not work (perl -c is for syntax checking).
> 
> $ egrep -i shell cron.8 |wc -l
>        0

>From "man 5 crontab"
       ...
       The  ``sixth''  field (the rest of the line) specifies the
       command to be run.  The	entire	command  portion  of  the
       line,  up to a newline or % character, will be executed by
       /bin/sh or by the shell specified in the SHELL variable of
       the  cronfile.	Percent-signs  (%) in the command, unless
       escaped with backslash (\), will be changed  into  newline
       characters, and all data after the first % will be sent to
       the command as standard input.
       ...

If you have a long running cron job and do not want the shell
to stick around, why not do:

* * * * * exec command < in > out
-- 
Mike Pritchard
mpp@mpp.minn.net
"Go that way.  Really fast.  If something gets in your way, turn"