Documentation:Cron

=Cron=

UGCS now supports user crontabs. This way you can have commands run at regular intervals with your UID. You can now run the standard "crontab" utility to edit a crontab file. Your jobs will be run with the AFS user "username_cron", so any files that it will read or write to should have AFS acl's set so that "username_cron" can read or write to the files. If you run into any problems, please contact us.

Details
Our centralized cron daemon (which runs on dionysus) reads cron files from /afs/.ugcs/drop/cron/username. Since you do not have permissions to write to /afs/.ugcs/drop/cron, you can run "create_cron_dir" to make it. Any files placed there will be read, and your jobs will be run on an available shellserver as often as you specify.

Access
Jobs are run with your UID and GID, but with the Kerberos principal and AFS user username_cron. If you want your script to be able to access your files, you need to set their AFS acl's such that the user username_cron can read (or write) them.

If you do not want to be emailed results, add the line "MAIL=" at the top of the file. To prevent abuse, there is currently no way to send mail to an email address other than your UGCS email.