[ale] One 'cron' question, one 'postfix' question

[Mills John M-NPHW64]

Scott -

Thanks. That's what I needed to know about the longish script.

I got the 'postfix' configuration sorted out by having 'dpkg-reconfigure
postfix' walk me through it. (I'm a total newbie to both debian and
ubuntu, so I'm getting the usual number of startup bruises.)

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
scott mcbrien
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:18 PM
To: John Mills; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] One 'cron' question, one 'postfix' question

Only an answer to the cron question... Below.

-Scott

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:08 PM, John Mills <johnmills at speakeasy.net>
wrote:
> ALErs -
>
> 1. "cron" question:
>
> I have an '/etc/cron.daily' entry which launches a script and
redirects
> its 'stdout' and 'stderr' output to harmless '/tmp' files. The script
> takes 10-15 minutes to run. (It checks out quite a bit of source code,
> builds serveral targets, and reports its successes and failures.)
>
> My question: Should my 'cron.daily' entry launch that script into
> background so no other task waits on its completion, or does the
'cron'
> manager do this automatically?
>
Depends, the stuff in /etc/cron.daily/ is executed serially, so
whatever is alphabetically after your job will not be executed until
your job completes (or at least returns the foreground shell).  Is it
OK for those jobs to wait 10-15 minutes?  If so I wouldn't worry about
backgrounding.  If not, then yes, have your shell script kick it as a
bg job.

-Scott
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