[Xastir] splay and Xastir

[James Cameron]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 12:09:56AM -0800, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, James Cameron wrote:
> >On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 09:36:16AM -0800, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> >>Crontab is for programs you want to start on a periodic basis.
> >
> >No, it's also for @reboot ... a special tag, see "man 5 crontab" ... it
> >means jobs get started as your username when the system has finished
> >booted.
> 
> This must be new since I learned about cron many years ago.  Perhaps
> Linux-specific?  I initially learned on SCO Xenix 286 and BSD Unix.

I don't know where it first appeared.  It isn't Linux-specific.  I
thought it had always been there.  Even had it on HP-UX, SCO, BSD and
Tru64 systems that I had shells on.  But no telling if those systems
were pristine out of the box crond.

Researching a little ... the Debian system I'm using has a crond derived
from Paul Vixie's cron version 3 from 1993, and has @reboot.  Paul was
in DEC at the same time I was.  ISC cron used by CentOS 5 also has the
feature.

> >On many Linux distributions there is also /etc/rc.local, a file that you
> >can place your startup commands in without having to fix up the init.d
> >symlinks.  These are run as root too.
> 
> That's BSD-ish (old style).  System5 init stuff is done with
> /etc/rc.d/init.d scripts and symlinks into /etc/rc.d/rc?.d
> directories to activate them at various runlevels.

Well, yes, that's how you should package things for SysV init, or the
later init systems that do dependency checking ... but in the old SysV
init in Linux both the BSD style and the SysV style are supported ...
and the comment in rc.local explains:

# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

So when you know someone is using a Linux, it's easier to explain to
them how to do the rc.local thing than how to maintain the symlink farm
of init.d ... mind you Ubuntu and Debian have update-rc.d scripts to
make that even easier.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/