What do slackers put in cron.*
 

I've just started looking into using cron, which I'm fairly new to linux. I've written a script to sync my time daily but was wondering what others use cron for?

Thanks

Usually for system maintenance tasks.

... and see man crontab for how to write an entry.

Note, you use crontab -e to edit a crontab file.

Hope this helps some.

What I have in my personal crontab:

1. remove vim/emacs backup files older than 30 days, once per day
2. get weather data from noaa for conky, twice per day
3. download any Slackware patches that exists twice a month

John

Avoiding Repetitive Tasks.

Member Response
 

Hi,

Or to run tasks on timely basis. :)

I use cron to run every six minutes the script that among the other things downloads new mail using POP3, checks whether new patches for Slackware appeared, and stores the ChangeLog.txt file locally.

I chmod 000 /etc/cron.daily/slocate to cut down on my disks' wear-and-tear, and run an analogous command by hand perhaps three times per year.

Like you, I add rsetdate to /etc/cron.daily. On my personal server in the colo I also added a script that downloads the Slackware changelog and emails any new entries to myself and some friends:
http://ciar.org/ttk/public/slacklog.pl

I run my podcatcher (I'm currently using podget) to pick my podcasts at 04:00 every morning.

Backup, update my custom motd, mail notification in case of alarm, and other things..

Thanks for your replies. @w1k0, I like the idea of checking for patches and maybe mailing them to root. Other ideas I had was to periodically run programs like aide and rkhunter, or would that be better done from a live distro?

Another thing I was thinking about was retrieving gmail, does anyone do this?

I have a script in cron.daily to sync my system clock with a time server.

Member Response
 

Hi,

'Time' is one that I do on a regular 'cron' task. Be sure to use a 'pool' so the load is handled properly.

I don't make much use of cron as I'm more of a ad-hoc kind of guy. Maybe if I left my system up 24x7 then I'd do things differently, but my box sleeps when I sleep.
:)


I think you're proably right to disable it. slocate/updatedb may make sense on a server with millions of files, but for a modern desktop/workstation that has more than enough ram to keep inodes/dirents in vfs_cache I'm not convinced a database based solution like slocate makes any sense..

I have this in my .bashrc, which I use instead and will pretty much do the same job as an "slocate -i" does without the need to run updatedb.

I mirror the host with rsync and sync the system time with sntp, both daily.