On Wed, 01 Mar 2000, you wrote:
| As a matter of fact... Cron is very flexible. I use it to start seti at boot
| time (well, kind of boot-time). You can set cron to execute a command every
| minute or every 5 minutes, or whatever... If the program does not protect
| against running multiple instances at once (like seti does), just write a script
| that checks if the program is running, and starts it if it isn't. That's not too
| hard.
|
| Anyway, I don't really see the difference between starting something at
| boot-time, or a few minutes after boot-time.
|
| And the crontab-option is far more elegant too, than meddling with rc.local
| (although somebody else will probably have a different opinion).
I would have a different opinion. rc.local is *designed* to do things
a boot time; cron is designed to do things on a reguar basis.
Seems more elegant to me use programs for the purpose for which they
were designed, and a solution that requires patching up a program to
see if it's already running is (IMHO) strong evidence that a kludge is
being pursued.
(Actually, in general, I dislike programs that check to see if they are
already running, or that refuse to run multiple copies simultaneously.
Seems not to be in the spirit of Unix to me. Granted that a *few*
programs, such as X servers or mail programs to a given destination,
might have good reason to need to do so.)
--
I am "Brian, the man from babble-on" (Brian T. Schellenberger).
I can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
I support http://www.eff.org & http://www.programming-freedom.org .
I boycott amazon.com. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html .
