On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Kenneth Stephen wrote:
> 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.
>
I said /root/ptofile or the "likes" meaning bashrc bash_profile you
name it, and it does not always work, its shell dependant, and it
would seem distro, indipendant, in that case the old word comes to
mind "rtfm". Having said that , that does not always give the same
answer as discussed later on.
>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.
>
Not intiryly, slackware has that link thing, /usr/bin/vi is a link
to "vim" same idea.
> 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.
I have always said and still do, if folks DO NOT give distro details
how the !uck can we give correct answers.
And further more is it my problem that distributors are sort of
fighting for a piece of the action, making thier product beter (or
worse) than another, causing more confustion when a question asker
DOES NOT say what distro he has.
>
> 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).
Be it tar or not, if distributions decide to ponce around making
thier product look beter than another but there within making it more
difficult to use and understand thats NOT my problem, its our problem
to give a decent answer to someone who says, how do i do this or that
on my "linux system". period.
>
> 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.
Once again this shows the need for the question asker to state which
distro he has, even you must agree there.
>
> The crontab specifications are different...
Not on my Slackware 3.6 and redhat 6.0 systems, i have jobs written
the same way and nothing out of the ordenry happens.
> 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.
Im am sorry to say once again a question of Reading manuels.
>
> 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?
Realy yes, i have said it now in this message 3 or 4 times, a
question asker MUST state what distro he uses, that has been
discussed before.
>
> Maybe, I should make this stuff part of the
> FAQ (which I need to > pay more attention to)...
Yes that might solve half the problem, the other half will never get
solved because newbies join everyday and this problem which you seem
to rant about will happen over and over, NO MATTER what you, i or we
( meaning others who answer mails here) can do about it.
A signature saying something like;
When asking questions include;
kernel version
distribution AND distro version number.
Hardware types, model numbers, a "COMPLETE" description of the
problem, not just "i got an error".
How much memory and what sort.
and + lots lots more, that must be a starter.
Please do not accuse me of giving missleading info, as i normaly say
some things are distro indipendant, looks like i forgot this time,
and i got flamed as well.
>
> Regards,
> Kenneth
>
> PS. Speaking of the FAQ, didnt someone on this list offer to setup a
> script to post it bi-weekly, or something?
--
Regards Richard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
