periodic jobs like FreeBSD

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting David Bear <David.Bear at asu.edu>:

> Does redhat support something close to the period scripts that FreeBSD
> has? The script I am interested in are the daily, weekly and monthly
> reports that include output from disk usage (df -h), and lastlog.

The logwatch package will produce daily report with stuff you want  
(and more) and mail it out (to root).  You can invoke it from command  
line with different time span, and also have it either use only  
current log files, or both current files and archived files.

If you want something more specific, general guideline is, use cron to  
schedule periodic jobs.  That's what it is for.  I guess "periodic  
scripts from FreeBSD" you mentioned are started by cron daemon too.

You've several options.

You can write your own scripts and place them under /etc/cron.hourly,  
cron.daily (runs @ 4:02), cron.weekly (runs @ 4:22) and cron.monthly  
(runs at 4:42) directories.  Those normally are started as root user.   
For example, logwatch will install its script into cron.daily.

You can add jobs into /etc/crontab to be run at whatever time and time  
intervals you choose (stuff for cron.* directories is called from  
there).  They'll run as specified user.

You can add cronjobs to any user's personal cronjob file using crontab  
command.  Don't forget to check content of /etc/cron.allow and  
cron.deny files to see if user is allowed to have personal cron jobs.   
Those jobs will run as user they belong to, at whatever time interval  
and time you choose.