UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am not authorised to use cron or at to perform periodic backups. Are there any other options available that would not require elevated permissions?

cron or at does not require elevated permission but only be permitted by root: either you are present in cron.deny or at.deny, either you are not in cron.allow or at.allow, second being more likely...
get yourself in /var/adm/cron/cron.allow and you will be able to use crontab files (must be root to edit cron.allow...), look at the man pages of crontab...

or use a loop with a sleep of 86400 ...

You can write a while true script and fork it and background to run indefinely until it matches certain conditions (time a day, number of backup etc.)

This is a sample code without any error handling.

Code:

TIME=$(date "+%H%M")
while true
do
     case $TIME in
     0856) echo "do smth in 08:56"
     ;;
     1010) echo "do smth in 10:10"
     ;;
esac
sleep 1
done

Your paste it into a shell script and run it like

Code:

bash scriptname.sh &

That way scriptname.sh will be shown in ps -ef | grep scriptname.sh, so you can stop it by force (kill on pid or alike)

But rather user cron or at, that's what they are made for.

Hope that helps
Regards
Peasant.

These are company servers that are locked down by a security system called KeON so yeah I'm probably in one of those files or there's some sort of group definition keeping admins in my function from doing anything like that.

---------- Post updated at 12:48 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:46 PM ----------

I like this idea - I'll try it out. If I have to re-push it every week or something I wouldn't have a problem with that at all. Just anything where I won't have to do it daily. Thanks!

What backup solution do you use and what backups are we talking about?
Do you backup to a tape library or something similar? Most tape libraries I worked with were able to initiate backups so there is no need to schedule anything at client side.
Is it a database you wish to backup? Some come with their own scheduling mechanism that can initiate backups too.

No this is really simple stuff that would simply make my work a little easier. Things like going out to each server, getting a copy of the /etc/passwd file, putting all of them into 1, unique file, separating it by fields, processing a report that comes to me each week, little stuff like that.

first u type edit=vi
then u type editor=vm