[plug] Crontab??

[William Kenworthy]

cron implements a very "bare" environment that uses the primative "sh"
shell and applications that depend on having a normal environment will
often fail.  This can often be passed on the command line (if you can
find out what it needs) e.g., to set the MYVAR env. variable for the
spawn try "MYVAR=something command"

The "&" tells the command to execute and return control back to the
terminal straight away.  Normally not used in a crontab, and might cause
problems.

BillK

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 06:30, Jay Warwick wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 20:38, James Devenish wrote:
> 
> > Also, note that it might not be a good idea to attempt a "long-running"
> > cron job. If you test the above and it works, you might then choose to
> > change it to this in future:
> > 
> > 00      21      *       *       fri          env DISPLAY=:0 firefox &
> 
> A week or so ago I asked a crontab question and was informed my answer
> was probably in the man pages - I was trying to get my computer to run a
> virus scan on the whole system at a specific time each week.  The job
> would not work, however if I simply ran the command myself it would
> run.  After much searching on the internet I concluded that it must be
> timing-out because crontab implements every minute so set-up a script to
> be run instead. This brings me to my question - on the last line above,
> what is the meaning of the '&', does it allow the job to stay open for a
> longer period?
> 
> 
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