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...).
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IMPORTANT NOTICES
Read the BUGS file.
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.
