-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2005-11-27 at 17:49 -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
It has been this way for years.
That's a non-sequitur. The fact that a behavior is old doesn't mean it could not bear improvement.
I mildly dislike the current behavior (it's insufficiently stable and not subject to my direct control) and would like to see a means of explicitly configuring the nominal time at which these housekeeping actions take place. The fact that it actively tries to catch up if it misses a scheduled run is good, of course. And I can see why for some people adapting permanently to that time might be good, based on the inference that if the system wasn't up at, say, 4:00 AM one day, it may not be an always-on system and a different time for daily chores should be chosen. But for those who do run an always-on system, shifting the scheduled time after missing one scheduled run is less the optimal, to say the least.
As a quick "solution", I think you can simply remove the flag file a pair of minutes before your prefered time for the runs to occur - not, as I thought previously, touching that file. Ie, if you delete '/var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily' at 1:28 AM, it will run at 1:30 AM; this can be done as a cronjob, or with the command "at" for one shot. As an alternative, if you have a preferred timeframe when you'd like these daily chores to run, would be to edit the crontab entry (in '/etc/crontab'). Right now (SuSE 9.3) I have: - -*/15 * * * * root test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1 If I wanted it to only run somewhere in the early hours, I could use: - -*/15 0-6 * * * root test .... but then, cron.hourly would not run during the day. Else, as there are people here fluent with script writing, someone could think of a modification of the /usr/lib/cron/run-crons script to run at certain prefered hours, and/or not to run at certain hours, as a variable in '/etc/sysconfig/cron' perhaps. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDi1lotTMYHG2NR9URAvHpAKCFWr+IgbvkSrWvckKTkAUWVyfYVACeJwyh eeeAIO9Vux5fvsbgfE4GjEM= =/5tf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----