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Originally Posted by
reddybs
Hi... I want to know whether if there is any alternative for cron.
cron is very well-established in the UNIX world, you can pretty much expect to find it wherever you go. Its concept is robust, reliable, and secure. Most 'alternatives' you will find to the standard cron amount to different implementations of cron...
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I had written a script which checks for all system/application processes every 15 min(placed in cron though). But looks funny - what if cron daemon isn't running!!
Likely the same thing that'd happen if this "Patrol" thing wasn't able to load itself and schedule things for whatever reason. If cron wasn't running, that would likely point to problems larger than your script... I've only managed to confuse cron once in my life -- by putting the system clock three
months into the future by accident when it was already running.
It may seem a little odd to type things into a table file instead of enter them into a program, but cron is every bit as present and accounted for; just perhaps a little less direct, and that separation is one thing that makes it so dependable. Just make sure your user belongs to the cron group.
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Is there any alternative, unlike installing/going for applications like Patrol for UNIX???
'patrol', if that program is what I think it is, it bears little resemblance to cron. cron's job is to run programs at scheduled times. Nothing more, nothing less. Remote monitoring would be done with different things -- though lots probably need cron
Though there
is another cron-like thing for UNIX that I know of -- the
at daemon. Fallen into disuse these days but you should still be able to install it if you want it. It lets you use relative times, which is occasionally useful. You could do
echo /sbin/reboot' | at + 15 minute to reboot the system in 15 minutes.