Hacker News Reader

Comment by koytch | Hacker News Reader

It's ugly, simple and flexible. I can live with its ugliness (I don't change my crontab every day, after all) and simplicity and flexibility beat ini format/UX/etc. any time AFAIC.

View on HN

My main problem with the cron syntax is that is error prone. I'd like it to be a bit harder to get correct syntax when you write something wrong.

But a simple GUI could take care of that.

Something curses based would be nice - no need for a GUI ;). Cron's syntax can be hellish. For example, % is treated as a special newline character (ugh) so that commands like this don't work - and it's very difficult to troubleshoot:

  appstartup.sh | tee -a app.`date +%Y%m%d`.log

Reply on news.ycombinator.com