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Add new functionality and syntax to cron(1) to allow to run jobs at a

Description

Add new functionality and syntax to cron(1) to allow to run jobs at a
given interval, which is counted in seconds since exit of the previous
invocation of the job. Example user crontab entry:

@25 sleep 10

The example will launch 'sleep 10' every 35 seconds. This is a rather
useless example above, but clearly explains the functionality.

The practical goal here is to avoid overlap of previous job invocation
to a new one, or to avoid too short interval(s) for jobs that last long
and doesn't have any point of immediate launch soon after previous run.

Another useful effect of interval jobs can be noticed when a cluster of
machines periodically communicates with a single node. Running the task
time based creates too much load on the node. Running interval based
spreads invocations across machines in cluster. Note that -j/-J won't
help in this case.

Sponsored by: Netflix

Details

Provenance
glebiusAuthored on
Parents
rS334816: Fix excise_initrd_region() to support 32- and 64-bit initrd params.
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