[CentOS] cron.weekly

Tue Sep 16 22:27:09 UTC 2014
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2014-09-16, Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com> wrote:
> On 9/16/2014 13:24, Matt wrote:
>> If I have multiple files in cron.weekly and one script takes hours to
>> finish.  Will it block other scripts in cron.weekly?
>
> I doubt it, based on the results of this crontab on EL7:
>
> 51 13 * * * echo start 1 ; sleep 2m ; echo end 1
> 51 13 * * * echo start 2 ; sleep 2m ; echo end 2
>
> At 13:51, nothing appeared in my mail file.  Two minutes later, two 
> different messages appeared, each with the expected "echo" outputs. 
> Thus, they must have run in parallel.

Those are two distinct cron jobs.  The scripts in /etc/cron.weekly are
all run by the same cron job in /etc/crontab.

47 6    * * 7   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.weekly )

I believe that run-parts runs each script in serial, and therefore a
long-running weekly script will block.

If you don't care when you get the output, and have only one
long-running script, you can rename it so that it runs last.  Otherwise,
you'd need to put the long-running job into its own cron entry.

--keith



-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us