On 5 June 2013 23:34, Christian Kastner <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2013-06-05 13:12, Saint Germain wrote: >>>> Indeed even if cron has nothing to do, a temporary file is >>>> always created in /tmp and immediatly deleted. >> >> "nothing to do" = there is no job (cron.hourly is empty and users >> cron are empty) >> >> However it would more elegant for cron to skip this file creation >> in case there is no job to execute. > > Ah, but there is one job running: run-parts. > > The scripts in cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} are not processed by > the cron daemon directly. Instead, the system crontab /etc/crontab > contains schedules for calls to "run-parts /etc/cron.[interval]", and > run-parts then processes those scripts. From cron's POV, there is > always exactly 1 process being run. > > So another workaround for you would be to comment out the hourly > stanza from /etc/crontab. > > Any other solution would be overly complex to implement, I'm afraid.
Ok I haven't carefully read the commit, so I didn't understand why this file creation was necessary in the first place (and why other distro don't have this behavior). If mounting /tmp on a tmpfs as a workaround is acceptable, probably that creating the temporary file directly in RAM would also be acceptable ? Anyway, as you are the maintainer, I think you are much knowledgeable than me to decide what is best for Debian. >> This is only a minor bug though, but I spent quite a long time >> tracking it (especially given that only Debian users have this bug) >> so I thought that it may be useful to report it. > > I agree, thank you. > >> I can of course mount /tmp on a tmpfs, but it seems to me that it >> would be overkill (as cron is the only software I have which >> behaves like this). A better workaround would be for me to simply >> comment the line cron.hourly in /etc/crontab (as I don't have any >> hourly job). > > (Off-topic, personal opinion: having a tmpfs on /tmp has many other > benefits, eg: there is no need to clean the filesystem on boot. Most of > the stuff in /tmp is probably going to be cached, ie in RAM, anyway) Hum, that is a very hot question that was discussed many many times: http://lwn.net/Articles/499534/ I think it is better to avoid discussing too much this particular hot topic "/tmp on tmpfs". ;-) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
