GNU mcron --- README -*-text-*-
Copyright (C) 2003, 2005, 2006 Dale Mellor
Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.
This is version 1.0.6 of the GNU mcron program. It is designed and written by
Dale Mellor, and replaces and hugely enhances Vixie cron. It is functionally
complete, production quality code (did you expect less?), but has not received
much testing yet. 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.
For use as a replacement cron daemon on a system, 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 Vixie or
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 - or else look very carefully at the
options you pass to the package configure script, as follows.
It is often the case that GNU/Linux distributions and other Unices hacked the
cron daemon to use different directories to those above. You can use configure
options --spool-dir, --socket-file, --allow-file, --deny-file, --pid-file and
--tmp-dir to make mcron behave similarly. Note that, with the exception of
tmp-dir, none of these files or directories should be accessible by ordinary
(non-root) users.
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, but if
your existing system has a binary called crond, you should make this a link
to mcron), and you should be able to continue to use your existing crontabs
without noticing any changes.
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 (or m.crond) and m.crontab.
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See the file INSTALL for generic building and installation instructions.
After installation, read the info file for full instructions for use (typing
`info mcron' at the command line should suffice). Notes for end users,
sysadmins, and developers who wish to incorporate mcron into their own programs
are included here.
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 to bug-mcron@gnu.org. Other mailing lists you
could subscribe to are help-mcron@gnu.org (for help and advice from the
community, including the author) and info-mcron@gnu.org (for news as it
happens).
Mcron is free software. See the file COPYING for copying conditions.
The mcron development home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/mcron, and it
can be obtained from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/mcron.
