[BBLISA] crontab - corrected version

[John Stoffel]

Dean> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Steve Revilak wrote:
>> 
>> This is actually a pretty hard problem.  

Dean> That's it! Cron has always been a piece of crap and source of
Dean> security problems that _desperately_ needs rewriting by real
Dean> programmers.

I'm not so sure that I agree that cron is a security problem.  It's
certainly no worse than letting users onto your system and letting the
run commands.  And we all know *that* is the real security issue:
users.  *grin*


Now in terms of making cron better and more useful, then I agree there
are potential things that would help alot here.  But in general, cron
works well for what it's supposed to do.  

But locking, exclusion, error handling, etc are *tough* problems in
themselves and depend heavily on the application that's being run
through cron.  

We humans are great at exception handling, but trying to write code to
do it well is hard, and suddenly you find that 90% of your code is now
handling exceptions.  Ugh.

John