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> Spend a focused 10 minutes to really try and understand them I've spent the past years doing that. I do understand cron. I also strongly dislike it. You coul

> Spend a focused 10 minutes to really try and understand them I've spent the past years doing that. I do understand cron. I also strongly dislike it. You could build a thriving city within the bounds of the room there is for improvement. > It even handles that crazy case where you want to run on a specific day of the week. So does systemd's cron. Supporting "crazy cases" doesn't mean the syntax has to suck. > Cron lines may seem arcane at first, but then again have you ever tried to write code that was timezone aware? Yes... Re systemd: It's one example; it's not perfect, I wouldn't even call it good, but it's leagues ahead of cron in terms of UX already. Bonus: usage of the ini format means it's programmatically much easier to interact with the cronjob itself.

koytch 10y ago
It's ugly, simple and flexible. I can live with its ugliness (I don't change my crontab every day, after all) and simplicity and flexibility beat ini format/UX/etc. any time AFAIC.
- berntb 10y ago
  My main problem with the cron syntax is that is error prone. I'd like it to be a bit harder to get correct syntax when you write something wrong. But a simple GUI could take care of that.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Something curses based would be nice - no need for a GUI ;). Cron's syntax can be hellish. For example, % is treated as a special newline character (ugh) so that commands like this don't work - and it's very difficult to troubleshoot: appstartup.sh | tee -a app.`date +%Y%m%d`.log
bpchaps 10y ago
Agreed. I've been a sysadmin for about ten years now and absolutely loathe them. At the surface, they're simple to use, but it very, very quickly becomes a headache as the server count increases. That, and just about everyone who uses cron forgets to clean up their old messes or adds random scripts here and there, which makes a machine's crontab very, very messy. It makes finding a rogue cron job very, very difficult to find sometimes.

koytch 10y ago

It's ugly, simple and flexible. I can live with its ugliness (I don't change my crontab every day, after all) and simplicity and flexibility beat ini format/UX/etc. any time AFAIC.

berntb 10y ago
My main problem with the cron syntax is that is error prone. I'd like it to be a bit harder to get correct syntax when you write something wrong. But a simple GUI could take care of that.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  Something curses based would be nice - no need for a GUI ;). Cron's syntax can be hellish. For example, % is treated as a special newline character (ugh) so that commands like this don't work - and it's very difficult to troubleshoot: appstartup.sh | tee -a app.`date +%Y%m%d`.log

bpchaps 10y ago

Agreed. I've been a sysadmin for about ten years now and absolutely loathe them. At the surface, they're simple to use, but it very, very quickly becomes a headache as the server count increases. That, and just about everyone who uses cron forgets to clean up their old messes or adds random scripts here and there, which makes a machine's crontab very, very messy. It makes finding a rogue cron job very, very difficult to find sometimes.