Question

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Vermillion" <fp at wjv.com>
To: "filePro List" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: Question


> When asked his whereabouts on Fri, Jan 14 15:43 , Walter Vaughan took the
> fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
>
>> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>> >On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 03:19:19PM -0500, Fairlight wrote:
>> >>At Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 02:43:52PM -0500 or thereabouts,
>> >>suspect Courtney was observed uttering:
>> >>>One of the reps here wants a report every other Friday...I was 
>> >>>thinking
>> >>>of
>> >>if runfile exists (run report; remove runfile)
>> >>if runfile does not exist (create runfile)
>> >>....And I'd simply set this logic to run -every- Friday.  No worrying
>> >>about
>> >>dates, etc.  It just flip-flops.
>
>> Screw it. Set cron to run the report every Friday. Some stupid
>> holiday/lunar event is going to make him want you to change from even
>> week of the year Fridays to odd ones and back.
>
> Or set the day in cron as   5/2   which means every other Friday.
>
> I find the ability to use the /N in modern crons a great help
> intead of all the n,n,n,n,n,n,n,n thingys.
>
> I don't know if the @weekly/2  would work, because the @<field>
> are special

sco's cron doesn't support the / syntax

I'd run it every week or use Jay's idea.
Mark's idea is actually pretty tidy, but I just happen to hate hate hate 
sentinel files. Almost every time I have a problem with something that needs 
to be realiable (like nightly backups!) it's because of sentinel files and 
it's usually unnecessary.

Even though one of my own most useful gadgets relies on them, but only for 2 
minutes each and it doesn't matter if they go away or if fake ones show up 
or if permissions get fudged or if the box powers off ungracefully etc...
It's a self-cleaning temp directory based on writing a timestamp file every 
minute and deleting files older than the 2-minutes-ago timestamp file. Worst 
case is after a reboot some files might live another 2 minutes longer than 
they should have.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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