[Q] Cron frustration.....

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Mon Oct 21 01:46:51 EST 2002


At 02:37  20/10/02 +1000, Donovan J. Edye wrote:
>I am sure this is simple one, but for the life of me I cannot see why this
>won't work. I have the following:
>
># Attempt to start SETI every 5 mins. If already running this will be
>ignored
>2,7,12,17,22,27,32,37,42,47,52,57 * * * * cd ~/seti; ./setiathome -nice
>19 -proxy 192.168.40.10:5517


to avoid confusion, I usually have special scripts set up to do the actual 
work of the cron job, and I just have cron run the script.

So have a script which does what you want, that doesn't rely on ~ expansion 
or environment variables.  Then run that script from cron, instead of the 
specified command line.

Is there any real need to launch setiathome two minutes past the five 
minute mark?  If you were launching a very heavy but short running program, 
I could understand staggering start times, but for setiathome which is a 
long running program, you may as well specify the time as "*/5 * * * *" to 
save space :)

Alex




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