Subject: Re: Who's accessing my disk?
To: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
From: dustin sallings <dustin@spy.net>
List: current-users
Date: 02/07/1999 14:55:14
On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Jukka Marin wrote:

// atrun is being run by cron, so atrun is NOT doing "the same thing".  
// Why integrate the at system specific things into cron?

	The fact that one runs the other doesn't mean they're doing
something different.  The way I see it is this:

cron: wakes up periodically and sees if there is anything for it to do.
at:   wakes up periodically and sees if there is anything for it to do.

	Both of them have to handle IO redirection, mailing the output to
a user, etc...

	The only difference is that at jobs are always executed once, and
cron jobs are always repeated.  It doesn't seem that there should be two
different programs to do the same thing because of such a small
difference.  That's a lot of repeated code isn't it?  Not to mention you
have to execute another process every x minutes to see if there's anything
there.  If it were internal to cron, the same process would be checking
both jobs.  Isn't this the reason that atrun is run every ten minutes by
default?  I personally like my jobs to run more closely to when I say to
run them, but when I turn it up to every minute, my disks all spin up
every minute to execute atrun and log the cron job.

// About running jobs immediately - this could be integrated to at, I
// guess.

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