Question

[Bill Vermillion]

On Fri, Jan 14 17:35 , Brian K. White moved his mouse, rebooted for the 
change to take effect, and then said:" 

> 
> ----- 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

It's always been 'so last century'.  

> 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.

I concur.

> 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.

What do you do to keep the temp files that are supposed to be there
until the ap using them exits?

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com