Process Scheduling - Feedback from Neil McKellar
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 13:25:03 -0600
I was reading your web page article and thought you might like a rather graphic example of the difference between NT's at command and cron.
I have been involved in migrating some web and FTP services from a Solaris platform to NT (don't ask!), and there was a need to move a scheduled task that was previously handled by cron and some Korn shell scripts.
The scripts were re-written in Perl in short order, but the scheduling of the task turned out to be a headache.
The task needs to run every 3 minutes. Under UNIX this meant a single, although ugly, entry listing the minutes in the hour. Under NT this meant making 720 entries into the Scheduler using at (one for each discrete time -- 20 per hour with 24 hours). Needless to say I wrote a Perl script to do that. For ease of re-use (and since I expect to need it again), I set it up to read and attempt to re-create a cron file. And even so, I can't duplicate the full functionality of cron. I can't schedule items to occur on specific months for instance. I would need to add a special task to start up periodically and change the currently scheduled list of jobs. What a kludge!
Neil McKellar
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