Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 18:05:10 -0600 (CST) From: Ryan Thompson <freebsd@sasknow.com> To: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> Cc: Pekka Savola <Pekka.Savola@netcore.fi>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Huge crontab jobs are not run Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001021748190.34858-100000@sasknow.com> In-Reply-To: <20000102212831.A4183@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>
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On Sun, 2 Jan 2000, Ben Smithurst wrote: > Ryan Thompson wrote: > > > Did you kill -HUP cron? If you didn't do this (or reboot the system), > > your job won't run. > > According to the manpage, you don't need to: > > | Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's > | modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has, cron > | will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have > | changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is mod- > | ified. Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool > | directory whenever it changes a crontab. Hmm... I stand corrected :-) I haven't looked at than man page for quite some time. Anyway, kill -HUP can't hurt, and might actually kick a few things into shape if modtimes get set incorrectly :-) <ASIDE> Isn't checking all crontabs every minute kind of a waste of good resources in many cases? The only crontab I use on my system is /etc/crontab, and it changes infrequently. For systems that allow users to set their own cron jobs, and/or implement frequent/automated changes, perhaps by the minute modtime checks is a reasonable solution. For (I'm reaching, here) MOST systems, though, /etc/crontab is it, and doesn't change much. Should there be a way to disable the per-minute checks and force updates to be done via kill -HUP? There doesn't appear to be a way to do this without going to source. Anybody aware of one? </ASIDE> > The manpage may be wrong, of course. > > -- > Ben Smithurst | PGP: 0x99392F7D > ben@scientia.demon.co.uk | key available from keyservers and > | ben+pgp@scientia.demon.co.uk > -- Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com> 50% Owner, Technical and Accounts Phone: +1 (306) 664-1161 SaskNow Technologies http://www.sasknow.com #106-380 3120 8th St E Saskatoon, SK S7H 0W2 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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