HACKER Q&A
📣 cheekusm

Are you looking to automate your Cron Jobs?


Are you tired of writing Cron jobs again and again over your database? Do you want something to be more GUI based where you can just make rules and set the frequency of the Cron job and it starts to run automatically?

  👤 turtleyacht Accepted Answer ✓
systemd just released a new version, according to HN [1]. What if we published a uniform interface to a smattering of different scripts, as scripts?

It would be like asdf for daemons.

For cron, we could mark a `cal` output with a pattern, and it would emit the necessary cron:

    January 2022   February 2022
     1 2 3 4 5 ...  1 2 3 ...

    > 1/1 1/2 1/3 1/4
    Pattern matching... Done.
    Oh, you'd like to run it (d)aily or (w)eekly?
    > w
    The cron pattern for that would be:
      0 0 * * 0
    (C)opy to clipboard, (q)uit, (m)ore?
    > C
    Copied. Exiting.
It would let us investigate sequences (or skipped sequences) as certain colored vertices in a graph. Or something like that, maybe.

And submit a patch to each init daemon to add similar capabilities.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33416599