periodic and cron doubt

Hi,
I'm not sure what the real purpose of periodic is. Periodic is launched via cron, and it seems to me works only as a "container" for a set of script that can be managed via a single cron line. But I guess there is something more than reduce typing in crontab, maybe a specific environment settings? What is the added value of periodic to cron?
 
On my machines the outputs of all periodic jobs are collated into one nice email.

I get one daily status mail per machine, one security, one weekly, one monthly.
Instead of getting a number of cron-emails.

I like it.
 
Periodic scripts are run on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These are "cron" jobs that do a bunch of administrative tasks. All of the periodic scripts are configured via a single config file /etc/periodic.conf with defaults pre-set in /etc/defaults/periodic.conf. You can pick and choose which periodic scripts are run, and when.

Think of periodic like a set of canned cron jobs that can give you all kinds of insight into how your system is working, with nicely formatted, easy-to-read combined e-mail messages (one per periodic run).

It provides a nice separation, IMO, between user tasks (user crontabs), system tasks (/etc/crontab), and system administrivia tasks (periodic).

Just imagine the mess if that would be /etc/crontab if each and every single periodic script was listed in there, with comments about what they do, most commented out. :)
 
phoenix said:
It provides a nice separation, IMO, between user tasks (user crontabs), system tasks (/etc/crontab), and system administrivia tasks (periodic).

Just imagine the mess if that would be /etc/crontab if each and every single periodic script was listed in there, with comments about what they do, most commented out. :)

Thanks, in fact it is a mess on systems that do not present this type of scheduling (I mean the crontab is really messed up).
 
Sorry to pick up again this thread, but I'm curious: is there a particular difference between period and (ana)cron daily/weekly run parts?
 
fluca1978 said:
is there a particular difference between period and (ana)cron daily/weekly run parts?
If you mean like the anacron from Red Hat then no,there isn't really a difference.

It may have been implemented differently but the results are the same. It runs one or more scripts on a daily, weekly and/or monthly basis.
 
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