-*-text-*-

This is version 0.99.1 of the mcron program, designed and written by Dale
Mellor, which replaces and hugely enhances Vixie cron. It is functionally
complete, production quality code (did you expect less?), but has not received
much testing yet and contains known bugs. It has only been built on a GNU/Linux
system, and will most likely fail on others (but you never know...).

Mcron is supposed to be 100% Vixie compatible. However, in the current release
this is broken, and by default only 50% compatibility is installed.


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IMPORTANT NOTICES

Read the BUGS file.

By default, the cron and crontab programs are not installed, and mcron will
happiliy coexist alongside any existing cron programs you have on your
system. The Vixie-style programs can be installed by specifying --enable-vixie
to the configure command, in which case you must take heed of the following
notes.


    Do not (yet) install this software on a machine which relies for its
    functioning on its current set of crontabs.

    The package must be installed by root.

    Before installing this package for the first time, it is necessary to
    terminate any running cron daemons on your system. If your old cron is not
    accurately Vixie compatible (files in /var/cron/tabs*, /var/cron/allow,
    /var/cron/deny, /etc/crontab, /var/run/cron.pid) then you will need to clear
    out all old crontabs and make new ones afresh.

    If your old cron is Vixie, or very similar, mcron should fall right into
    place where your old cron was (the binaries cron and crontab will be
    replaced), and you should be able to continue to use your existing crontabs
    without noticing any changes. Bear in mind that if you use /etc/crontab,
    then changes to this file will *not* take immediate effect (this is the 1%
    incompatibility between mcron and Vixie cron); you may want to add a comment
    to this file with a note to this effect. Alternatively, use the new mcron
    program, it's better!

    If you don't want to clobber your existing cron executables, you can specify
    the --program-prefix option to configure with a prefix ending in a
    non-alphabetic character, for example "m.", and then run the programs as
    m.mcron, m.cron and m.crontab.
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See the file INSTALL for building and installation instructions.

After installation, read the info file for full instructions for use (type
`info mcron' at the command line).

Known bugs are noted in the BUGS file, and features which might be implemented
sometime sooner or later are noted in the TODO file.

Please send all other bug reports by electronic mail to:
   dale_mellor@users.sourceforge.net

Mcron is free software. See the file COPYING for copying conditions.