> Vixie ipse dixit is true, but not a technical argument. It's also rather presuming that Vixie cron is the only cron, something that hasn't been true for ...

> Vixie ipse dixit is true, but not a technical argument. It's also rather presuming that Vixie cron is the only cron, something that hasn't been true for ... ahem! ... a little while now. Back at the turn of the century, a bloke named Paul Jarc looked into how one could do cron the daemontools way. What he came up with was called runwhen. You can still find his WWW page on the subject. * http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/ http://code.dogmap.org/runwhen/ I incorporated some of the ideas into the (32-bit) OS/2 Command Line Utilities, albeit heavily modified to address an operating system that most definitely did not do chain loading. * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/clu.html#runwhen http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa... There are several things to learn from this. First, the world is not as rigid as some would have you believe. There's been a lot of work on service and system management, cron alternatives, and other stuff over the years. For a less radical cron than runwhen, witness Bruce Guenter's bcron. (The nosh package has a service bundle for bcron, by the way.) * http://untroubled.org/bcron/ http://untroubled.org/bcron/ * http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/ Second, what might be true about old Vixie cron specifically isn't gospel for the entire world. It's interesting to observe, as I have mentioned before, how much influence the daemontools family has had over the past decade and a half. Looking at cronie, to pick an example, one can see it nowadays is yet another member of the club of programs sporting a "don't do all that bogus daemonization stuff" option, -n in this case. GNU cron (a.k.a. Mellor cron) actually does not "daemonize" by default, and one has to explicitly choose that with a -d option. To look at old Vixie cron, one might come to the erroneous conclusion that cron always and unavoidably "daemonizes", something that was indeed a problem for daemontools users in the late 1990s. But this isn't true by a long chalk today.