Ask HN: Better than Cron?

3 pointsgabrielkhaselev2 comments

I know that cron can go a long way for scheduling jobs to run periodically, but I am looking for an open source tool that can schedule jobs and also provide me with cpu, memory, status etc. statistics on the jobs it runs. Ideally the tools would be language agnostic and easy to monitor. Any ideas?

View on HN

> Ideally the tools would be language agnostic and easy to monitor

That's literally cron.

In order to get the output of a cronjob, most of the implementation will let you prepend a MAILTO="<user>" before the line containing the job. A mail will be delivered to the system user identified by <user>, likely in /var/spool/mail/<username>.

I am not sure, but maybe you can use a full email address too.

Want statistics? Wrap your command in a statistics-gathering application (go find one in the internet or roll yourself).

Run the job through something that will do it, there is no need for this feature to be provided by cron itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com