this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Works if manually restarted by an intern from time to time (lemmy.world)
submitted 23 hours ago by merari42@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] dotslashme@infosec.pub 30 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

My current project has a crontab with 216 entries.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 33 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Well, here's a sentence I haven't been tempted to use before:

"I believe that may be too many crontab entries."

[–] DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Any problem in server administration can be solved with an additional crontab entry. Except for the problem of too many crontab entries.

[–] Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

And that's why I added a crontab entry that periodically purges my cron configuration. That way, I'm forced to readd only the truly necessary cron jobs, successfully reducing the amount of crontab entries.

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

just randomly delete 50 of them.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 16 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yes. The strongest crontab entries will probably restore themselves. (For anyone reading along, this is sarcasm. Don't do this.)

[–] farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 hours ago

a crontab can regenerate from bisection to form two whole crontabs

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

pshaw, just drop in there and combine a few

/etc/cron.d/first25 /etc/cron.d/second25 ...

[–] j_z@feddit.nu 1 points 9 hours ago

This is the way. Exactly what we did + migrated 80% of everything to k8s cronjobs and Argo workflows

[–] Lightfire228@pawb.social 8 points 16 hours ago

Use SystemD timers, you animal

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

At some point it may be good to migrate to airflow or something similar.

It's not the number of entries that makes it bad. It's the fact that if you run crontab, they are gone...

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

At first I thought you missed the -r. Then I checked. Defaulting to STDIN here is very, very dumb, IMHO. Almost as bad as putting the “edit” flag right next to the “delete everything without confirmation” flag on a Western keyboard (-e vs -r).

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

Crontab is a really badly designed program that we just can't fix because everybody depends on its WFTs for something.

[–] dondelelcaro@lemmy.world 9 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

That's why there's a crontab rule to load the crontab from a file. Cronception if you will.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Make the rule start a secondary cron system. Otherwise it won't run after you erase the crontab.

[–] dondelelcaro@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Here you go:

with-lock-ex -q /path/to/lockfile sh -c '
while true; do
    crontab cronfile;
    sleep 60;
done;'