On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:26 PM, Richard Elling <Richard.Elling at sun.com> wrote: > Seems to me that it should use iCalendar (RFC2445) format > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar > no sense in inventing yet another calendar format... > -- richard
That is a wonderful idea. If the storage mechanism also allows for attachments, this could be a good move forward too. With the current cron implementation, I have run into problems with the following: Problem 1: % marks a newline: 0 * * * * /some/command > /var/log/out.`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S` 2>&1 0 12 14 2 * mailx john%Happy Birthday!%Time for lunch. I would like the first one to work and for the second one to allow me to specify the attachment or use a simple shell script with a here document. Problem 2: Where to put the shell script? It is common to have a shell script that only exists to be run through cron. This can be because it is ugly on a single line or because of a limitation of cron. As an example of a limitation, see above. If the cron job could embed an arbitrary executable the cron job would be one cohesive unit regardless of complexity of the command to run. In the end, cron may still store attachments in a private area under /var, but this is an implementation detail. As others have said - I think the value is in a decent programmatic interface rather than in SMF itself. I'm not so much for or against using SMF as I am for modernization of cron. As SMF grows to include more and more, I think it will start to have the complexity (richness?) of a file system or database. A file system with 100 files or a database with 100 rows is easy to display and understand. As the number of items stored in a file system, database, or SMF grows, non-trivial mechanisms (categorization, role-based views, etc.) for presenting the data becomes more important. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
