[Chicago-talk] CRON Jobs for the paranoid

[Warren Smith]

Scenario A -- This is a desktop machine running X
Generally, X is run on display :0.0 of localhost. So, in your crontab 
script, you can set DISPLAY=:0.0 and do things normally. However, with 
most X distributions, local security is enabled, so you would have to 
run xhost +localhost when you start X -- either by configuring your 
desktop environment or putting it in .Xsession.

Scenario B -- This is a server machine without X
If you are the sole user, you can have your crontab script execute wall, 
which will broadcast a message to all users. Otherwise, you can use 
write to accomplish amore directed approach, but write gets confused if 
you are logged in more than once.

Richard Reina wrote:

>Due to lack of trust my office network is not hooked
>up to the internet.  This means I (if I remeber)
>manually set the time on ntp server once per week so
>that the other computers can get the correct time.  I
>am cosidering writing a short perl script that when
>executed askes me for the time and resets the time on
>the ntp server.  However, if I have cron execute the
>script how can interrupt (get my attention) whatever I
>am doing when I am logged in.
>
>Any suggestions are appreceiated.
>
>Thanks, Richard.
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