On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Richard Adams wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Kenneth Stephen wrote:
> > On Thu, 26 Aug 1999, John Aldrich wrote:
> >
> > > How do I create a CRON entry to, for example, start XMMS at
> > > 0600 and play a particular MP3 file (or KMP3 to do the
> > > same)???
> > > What I'm wanting is to do something similar to what I had
> > > under Windows 98's Task Scheduler -- use my computer as an
> > > alarm clock.
> > > Thanks...
> > >
> >
> > John,
> >
> > The formant of crontab may differ from distro to distro, so you
> > would do well to do a 'man 5 crontab' on your system. The actual command
> > to specify cron settings is 'crontab -e'.
>
> crontab -e is ok if one is a 'vi' fanatic, however more then half of
> the linux users dont even know what vi is, half of the half that dont
> know vi wont know howto edit there crontab, my way is to export an
> editor in /rotot/profile or the likes.
>
> export EDITOR=/usr/bin/joe
>
> Or of course your editor of choise.
>
Richard,
First of all, before I get off on this rant, I'd like to mention
that I dont have a clue as to what this '/rotot/profile' file is.
Secondly, I think (and I may be wrong here), the EDITOR environment
variable is a RedHat specific solution. For instance, on Debian, I cant
find any reference to this in the cron / crontab man pages, and I do know
that the /etc/alternatives/vi symlink is what determines the actual editor
program that is used when 'vi' is invoked.
Which brings me to my rant :
I have noticed a disturbing trend recently. Distributions are
patching some basic Unix commands to have different options. As a result,
the advice you give a newbie may not be valid if he / she is running a
distribution that is different from yours.
An example would be the 'tar' command, about which we saw a query
recently. There exists a distribution (I forget which) which supplies a
tar with a '-y' option. This is the equivalent of the "standard" '-z'
flag. with the difference that the bzip2 compress program is invoked
instead of gzip. No such flag in Debian (though both Debian and RedHat
have the generic --use-compress-program flag).
A worse example is the '-M' flag of man. Both, the RedHat 'man'
and the Debian one use this flag to mean the same thing. But the behaviour
is different. The Redhat 'man' requires a 'man<n>' directory tree in the
path pointed to.
The crontab specifications are different...
The 'userid' and 'group id' assignments are different on
different distributions. I think, though, that the LSB is supposed to
solve this one.
The init scripts come in two different styles. The inittab numbers
mean different things in different distributions.
I guess these differences are to be expected, as different
distributions target different segments of the Linux community. However,
it doesnt make our task easier. And to make it worse, some of the people
contributing to this list, lack the experience to know that the advice
they give is distribution specific. They are to be commended for helping,
but sometimes they end up misleading. I dont see a way to solve this. Do
you?
Maybe, I should make this stuff part of the FAQ (which I need to
pay more attention to)...
Regards,
Kenneth
PS. Speaking of the FAQ, didnt someone on this list offer to setup a
script to post it bi-weekly, or something?
