3 ms·
> One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions. I was a long-time maintainer of Debian's cron, a fork of Vixie cron
by ckastner 4y ago
> One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions.
I was a long-time maintainer of Debian's cron, a fork of Vixie cron (all cron implementations I'm aware of are forks of Vixie cron, or its successor, ISC cron).
There are a ton of reasons why I wouldn't do this, the primary one being is that cron really just executes jobs, period. It doesn't serialize them, it doesn't check for load, logging is really rudimentary, etc.
A few years ago somebody noticed that the cron daemon could be DoS'ed by a user submitting a huge crontab. I implemented a 1000-line limit to crontabs thinking "nobody would ever have 1000-line crontabs". I was wrong, quickly received bug reports.
I then increased it to 10K lines, but as far as I recall, users were hitting even that limit. Crazy.
- kragen 4y agoIs Dillon cron a fork of Vixie cron?
- ckastner 4y agoHadn't heard of it before, and it appears not to be. There indeed exist a few non-Vixie-cron-derivative implementations but as far as I'm aware, all major Linux and BSD distributions use a Vixie cron derivative. Edit: I see now where I caused confusion. In my original post, I should have said all default cron implementations.
- kragen 4y agoI thought Dillon cron was the default cron in Slackware? Hard to be a more major Linux distribution than Slackware, in terms of historical impact if not current popularity.
- ckastner 4y agoCould be. Slackware is a popular name, but I would call it "niche" rather than a major distribution. Just my personal view, obviously.
- kragen 4y agoI just confirmed with a Slackware user today, it still does use Dillon cron. I had a vague memory from before I switched from Slackware to Debian late last millennium.
- ttkciar 4y agoIt always gives me a spell of cognitive dissonance when someone points out that Slackware is no longer a "major" distribution. It used to be the major distribution. Funny how times change.