how to prevent crontab concurrent update ? 1

[tubietulip]

Hi All,

last night a cronjob I had scheduled the day before didn't run.
Because I log all changes made in the crontabs (every minute I save the crontab if it differs from the last one),
I found out that a collegue also updated the crontab about the same time, but took longer to finish updating
and overwrote my changes .....

Is there a way to prevent this ?

Cheers René

 

[bfitzmai]

Each user can have their own crontab. Save the root crontab for root functions.

 

[daFranze]

my colleagues use SCCS for versioning files, but afaik there is no way to use this for system files such as crontab...

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years

 

[daFranze]

just another mad idea:

you can write a wrapper script around /usr/bin/crontab
(move /usr/bin/crontab to /usr/bin/crontab.bin, write a new /usr/bin/crontab which checks for a lockfile, if is is not there, create one and continue with /usr/bin/crontab.bin and all Parameters ($*), if a lockfile exists you can print out a messages "lockfile $lockfile exists, exiting")



Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years

 

[tubietulip]

Thxs,

as Franz suggested, I have built a "shell" around my crontab.
another solution would have been to install vim.

Cheers René