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Comment by surki | Hacker News Reader

Upstart is more for replacing init. Its less suitable for jobs that need to be started at particular times since its designed for starting and stopping services during boot and changes in runlevel.

I think long term plan for upstart is to replace cron[1](generating events at scheduled time ...)

And some more general information here [2]

[1] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/faq.html#replace-cron

[2] http://www.netsplit.com/2006/09/01/upstart-can-now-replace-s...

Ooh - hadn't seen that - looks interesting. I stand corrected.

Hopefully they do a better job than Apple. I had a number of issues with their init/cron replacement.

so true! Every time i'm forced to deal with launchd for scheduling, I wish I was using cron.

This is what I am looking forward to. Cron, atd, and init all have functionality that should be integrated and udev aware.

And this functionality should be easily available to all applications. If I want to send a specific email at noon, or backup my laptop drive every night at 3am only when on my home network, etc., I should be able to without using 5 different daemons or programs kept running in the background and hacked-together scripts.

It would be easier to use following cron syntax to run things at reboot :)

  @reboot /run/a/program

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