On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 21:56 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Wed, 24.11.10 15:22, Paul Wouters (paul(a)xelerance.com) wrote:
>
> On Wed, 24 Nov 2010, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>
> > BTW, regarding at and cron: what I was thinking of but never check
> > ehwther it is feasible is to make cron/at autostart a soon as some job
> > is scheduled. I.e. use .path trigger to check whether /etc/crontab and
> > user jobs exist, and start cron only then. Similarly for at. That way we
> > could support cron and at just fine, and wouldn't even have to run it by
> > default. I haven't looked into this in detail however, to see if the
> > file triggers systemd offers in .path units are already sufficient to
> > make this work.
>
> What if no jobs are there and a non-root user adds a crontab later on? Who
> will start cron (as root) ?
That's the point of the .path unit. i.e. you can list dirs to watch. If
a user then drop a file into one of those dirs cron gets automatically
started.
Basically, in your .path unit you'd write something like this:
[Path]
PathExists=/etc/crontab
DirectoryNotEmpty=/etc/cron.d
DirectoryNotEmpty=/var/spool/cron
And the moment where /etc/crontab starts to exist, or somebody drops a
file into /etc/cron.d or /var/spool/cron crond would be automatically
started.
But what is the point of this? The /etc/crontab always exists and there
always are some files in /etc/cron.d.
--
Tomas Mraz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
Turkish proverb