Crontab and init scripts

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "BN" == Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> writes:

BN> While I'm not *that* fond of the yum approach (it's sort of a
BN> hack), it's a better solution than running cron scripts for
BN> uninstalled things.

The only thing I see as being hackish is that the cron job always
runs, but it just doesn't do anything if the service is turned off.
With cacti, that means that every five minutes you're writing to
cron.log and spawning a shell which will check one file and exit.

What are the alternatives, assuming you don't want to modify cron?

* You could have the init.d script create and delete the crontab
  entry.  Certainly not much more palatable.

* Accept the status quo, where package installation is equated with
  "I want to run the service".

* Don't involve cron at all: start a shell script in the background,
  which fires off the real job once every five minutes.

* Make the admin put the crontab in place and ignore the standard
  method of specifying what services should run altogether.

I prefer the Yum method, myself.

 - J<