[RndTbl] How to modify file times?

John Lange john at johnlange.ca
Fri Jun 13 13:26:51 CDT 2008


That is an excellent solution.

Thanks Gilles!
-  
John Lange
www.johnlange.ca


On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 13:07 -0500, Gilles Detillieux wrote:
> There seems to be a tidy solution in example 22-2 here:
> 
> http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/suse_linux_guides/SLES10/suse_enterprise_linux_server_installation_admin/sec_suse_pakete.html
> 
> It just removes the relevant time stamp file 1 minute before the time 
> you actually want the job to run.  It'll still run the jobs when the 
> system starts up, much like anacron does with these jobs on 
> Fedora/RHEL/Ubuntu/Debian systems, but after that they should run at the 
> times you want.
> 
> On 06/13/2008 12:00 PM, John Lange wrote:
> > I love SUSE but I can't stand the way it implements cron.
> > 
> > Instead of using the usual /etc/crontab file to schedule cron.daily,
> > weekly etc, it creates files in /var/spool/cron/lastrun and uses the
> > file dates to schedule it's next run.
> > 
> > And it's completely arbitrary as to when things run. If you create
> > something in cron.weekly, it will execute it immediately and then
> > continue to execute it at that same time every week.
> > 
> > That doesn't sound so bad until you realize it uses the change
> > timestamp, not the modify or access timestamp.
> > 
> > And I'll give you one guess which timestamp you can't manually override
> > with touch? You guessed it, it's the change timestamp.
> > 
> > So if you want to change your scripts so that they run next Sunday at
> > 4am, you have to change your system clock back to last Sunday and
> > "touch" the files.
> > 
> > I'm really hoping someone has a better solution than this...
> > 
> 



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