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Love systemd timers

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Re: Love systemd timers

#151

Post by criddell »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #51
NikhilVerma wrote: post #39

I have a Canon printer, I actually can't trust that their print nozzle won't get jammed up after sitting idle for a while. So I had claude setup a systemd script to print a picture of my dog every week, I ensure it has enough CMYK spectrum to stress the printer. Its a nice surprise every monday as I sit on my desk to see a sudden picture pop up from the printer :)

Laser printers are your friend. The savings on consumables alone will make it pay for itself.

Laser printers are great for documents, but not very good for photos.

I have an ink jet printer that I like. I don't print very often (average a couple pages per week) but when I do it's a mix of documents and photos. The ink isn't cheap, but the quality seems good and for the amount I print the expense is minor.

Re: Love systemd timers

#152

Post by p0358 »

simoncion wrote: post #136
eqvinox wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you express those things in a systemd timer? E.g. run something 4x per day, */6 in cron.

Sure, I'll pile on here. To do nontrivial scheduling you'd use the entirely-obvious-and-intuitive syntax described at [0]. For example: Mon,Fri *-01/2-01,03 *:30:45 Who'd ever want to go back crontab format for nontrivial scheduling? [1] [0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... > [1] This question is sarcasm. SystemD is often like this... dead simple things look dead simple, but complex thi…

If you know the syntax, it's still actually rather trivial. Still easier to read than advanced cron magic.

Re: Love systemd timers

#154

Post by mschuster91 »

egorfine wrote: post #111

We have used cron perfectly fine for decades and it served us well within its very clear limitations. But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.

> But now obviously we were so blind and wrong all this time and the only true solution is of course systemd.

Come on, dude. That's unnecessarily polemic.

cron et al have served us for decades, yes. But that doesn't mean that cron is the solution that needs to accompany us until the heat death of the universe or year 2038, whatever comes first.

I agree, the systemd folks haven't exactly been the best when it comes to PR or when it comes to being even near feature parity with what they tried to replace. But now, they aren't just at feature parity, they surpassed plain old cron.

Maybe it is time to lay cron to rest, at least slowly.

Re: Love systemd timers

#155

Post by simoncion »

p0358 wrote: post #152
simoncion wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'll pile on here. To do nontrivial scheduling you'd use the entirely-obvious-and-intuitive syntax described at [0]. For example: Mon,Fri *-01/2-01,03 *:30:45 Who'd ever want to go back crontab format for nontrivial scheduling? [1] [0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... > [1] This question is sarcasm. SystemD is often like this... dead simple things look dead simple, but complex thi…

If you know the syntax, it's still actually rather trivial. Still easier to read than advanced cron magic.

> Still easier to read than advanced cron magic.

Looking at the other examples on that page, I'm gonna say that it's only arguably easier to read for basic stuff... especially if you're familiar with the syntax. The complex stuff is -at best- just as difficult.

Re: Love systemd timers

#156

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

Tsiklon wrote: post #69
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have been worse. Could have been YAML. Could have been XML.

XML - I see you’ve used macOS’ LaunchD, the system that inspired Systemd

Yeah, I'm a man of culture like this. However, systemd with its service dependencies runs circles around launchd in pretty much every aspect.

Re: Love systemd timers

#157

Post by bblb »

jjgreen wrote: post #32
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You absolutely can have spaces; most of mine look more like [Service] Type = oneshot WorkingDirectory = %h/current/ Environment = RAILS_ENV=production ExecStart = /bin/sh -lc "bin/db-backup --verbose"

Friend, you have changed my life

My epiphany a month ago was that I can use

   Environment = MULTIPLE=environment VARIABLES="in single line"

Re: Love systemd timers

#158

Post by ralferoo »

krunck wrote: post #140
pkal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with the syntax, so I am biased ("*/3" and "12,14,20" makes sense if you are familiar with Unix tools), but it is still more intuitive to me than the systemd unit file syntax and usage. I know that I just have to edit /etc/cron or throw any executable file into /etc/cron.d/monthly and it will work on my system, but I cannot write a systemd timer file from scratch without looking it, and to do that I fir…

Yeah, it would be nice to have a folder like /etc/systemd-jobs/ where I could put them and where there are no files unrelated to job scheduling. There is /etc/systemd/user, but it does get a bit of pollution depending on the system.

Not sure if you're talking about cron or systemd, but cron definitely has that in /etc/cron.d where you can have arbitrary crontabs, or /etc/cron.{hourly|daily|weekly|monthly} where you can just place arbitrary scripts if you don't care exactly when they run, just the frequency.

Re: Love systemd timers

#159

Post by LaSombra »

pkal wrote: post #127
jerf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You just put numbers aligned with the titles." That is not a fair summarization of their point because that is not the grammar. There's commas, slashes, asterisks, combinations, and then if you want randomization you need to put it in the command itself because cron can't do it. (Some crons can, but it's not a general capability of cron.) Writing a non-trivial cron spec is not easy.

I am familiar with the syntax, so I am biased ("*/3" and "12,14,20" makes sense if you are familiar with Unix tools), but it is still more intuitive to me than the systemd unit file syntax and usage. I know that I just have to edit /etc/cron or throw any executable file into /etc/cron.d/monthly and it will work on my system, but I cannot write a systemd timer file from scratch without looking it, and to do that I fir…

If you want to create a new systemd unit file you can run:

   $ sudo systemctl edit --force --full my-scheduled-work@.timer
or

   $ systemctl edit --user --force --full my-scheduled-work@.timer

Re: Love systemd timers

#160

Post by PenguinCoder »

iam-TJ wrote: post #116
eqvinox wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you express those things in a systemd timer? E.g. run something 4x per day, */6 in cron.

$ systemctl cat public-inbox-watch@.timer # /etc/systemd/system/public-inbox-watch@.timer [Unit] Description=Periodic fetch of public mailing list [Timer] # twice a day OnCalendar=*-*-* 5,17:35 RandomizedDelaySec=1h Persistent=true [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

So the `OnCalendar` stanza is the same as a Cron job; without the helpful comments of the ordering? And that is considered _easier_??

Just use Cron. It does one thing and does it well.

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