Copyright (C) 2003 Dale Mellor                        -*-text-*-
See the end for copying conditions.


This is version 0.99.3 of the mcron program (the third 1.0.0 release
candidate), 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. 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 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.

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 generic building and installation instructions.

After installation, read the info file for full instructions for use (type
`info mcron' at the command line). 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 either via Savannah (preferred) at
   https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=addbug&group=mcron
or else by electronic mail to:
   dale_mellor@users.sourceforge.net

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

The mcron development home page is at http://www.nongnu.org/mcron.




_______________________________________________________________________________
Copyright (C) 2003 Dale Mellor

   Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
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   copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved,
   thus giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.

   Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
   of this document, or of portions of it,
   under the above conditions, provided also that they
   carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.