<SOLVED> How to use Cronie? - (this thread include at/atd as well, if you interested)

Software Ports
1

I installed Cronie, but having a problem using it. I’d like to use it to reboot the computer every day at a certain hour. Anyway, running crontab -e in Terminal, I get this:

Welcome to the Haiku shell.

~> crontab -e
no crontab for user - using an empty one
/bin/sh: line 1: /usr/bin/vi: No such file or directory
crontab: “/usr/bin/vi” exited with status 127
~>

I think the error is related to cronie trying to use Linux’s Vi text editor, which doesn’t exist in Haiku. I can manually create and edit a crontab file, but I don’t know where to create it. Can anyone assist? Thanks

2

Vim is an improved version of Vi. Getting Cronie to recognize it might be difficult. How familiar are you with Bash scripting and Cron tables?

3

vi is the “fallback” editor for many (ported) terminal programms.

You can usually set the EDITOR env variable to another (blocking) text editor for ported applications so they use this instead

4

It is. pkgman install vim.

5

vi isn’t vim

6

Vim is largely vi compatible, mostly extending the features. Given that cronie most likely only wants to open a temporary crontab file with it it don’t expect any compatibility issues. But that’s only guessing, the OP will have to try it out. And if it works maybe vim should be included in the dependencies for cronie.

7

Thanks for letting me know :wink:
Let’s not get into nitpicking wars on Easter Sunday, shall we? As I wrote above, cronie most likely wants to call vi to simply open the crontab file. I don`t expect any vi vs. vim compatibility issues doing that.

8

I already wrote what to do above, most likely it does not care what editor it wants.

export EDITOR=nano and then call the command.

(and as someone who really liked nvi on FreeBSD but didn’t manage to use vim or nvim i’m certainly of the opinion it isn’t the same programm : )

9

The missing editor doesn´t seem to be the only problem with cronie. I have vim installed and get these errors:

~> crontab -e
/packages/cronie-1.5.2-2/.self/var/spool/cron: No such file or directory
/packages/cronie-1.5.2-2/.self/var/spool/cron: mkdir: No such file or directory

Looks like cronie wants to create the crontab file within the package itself, which obviously doesn´t work. This is not surprising because looking at the haikuports recipe there is no patch applied that does anything to point cronie at the right spool directories on Haiku (or at least I didn´t find any).

I think we really should have an integrated task scheduler on Haiku that can be configured via GUI to avoid having users messing around with cron-like programs. Sure, a having a task scheduler is probably not a high priority on a desktop OS but very useful sometimes nonetheless.

10

@kp3ft : There was a discussion about something similar on the forum a while ago, where a script was posted that runs in a loop and mimics the behaviour of a simple task scheduler. Maybe this could be a workaround for you for the time being.

11

Yeah, that was probably one of my previous posts. I need the Haiku computer to reboot at a particular time every very early morning. Some folks posted some scripts to try, but I couldn’t get them to work.

1 Like
12

It works! I did export EDITOR=nano and then crontab -e . Added a reboot statement in the crontab file and saved it. Computer rebooted right on schedule.

What worked for me to get Cronie working:

  1. Install Cronie from the package manager.
    2.Run in Terminal:
    mkdir -p /boot/system/var/spool/cron
    ln -sv /bin/crond ~/config/settings/boot/launch/crond
  2. Reboot (might not be necessary, but I rebooted anyway.)
  3. Run in Terminal:
    export EDITOR=nano
    crontab -e
3 Likes
13

.self links back to /system

It wants to create /system/var/spool/cron after figuring out it doesn’t exists, but it assumes /system/var/spool already exists.

It’s likely not that hard a fix to the port to make it use mkdir with the option to create intermediate directories, and use another editor.

1 Like
14

It probably should exist. It’s one of the BeAPI find_directory constants(B_SYSTEM_SPOOL_DIRECTORY). Then there would be no need to modify the cronie code.

15

I would join this scheduler stuff

Gr8 that crontab solved below …

Can someone add at command as well - I miss it : )
It should be standard POSIX command if I know well.

Ok I see, some OS uses an additional daemon ‘atd’ - so I see it is a bigger task to port / implement it to Haiku.

16

Update.

Ok, so now at command is available, at least for x86_64.

(When I requested here above to be available – I was still on 32 bit Haiku.)

~> pkgman search atd -D
Repository  Name                 Version        Arch  
------------------------------------------------------
<system>    at                   3.2.5-1        x86_64
HaikuPorts  at                   3.2.5-1        x86_64
HaikuPorts  matio                1.5.26-1       x86_64
HaikuPorts  matio_debuginfo      1.5.26-1       x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk11_default    11.0.9.11-1    x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk12_default    12.0.1.12-1    x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk13_default    13.0.2.8-4     x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk14_default    14.0.2.12-1    x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk15_default    15.0.1.9-2     x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk16_default    16.0.2.7-2     x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk17_default    17.0.7.3-2     x86_64
HaikuPorts  openjdk8_default     1.8.u242_b8-4  x86_64
HaikuPorts  texlive_mathscience  2023-2         any   
~> 
~> pkgman search atd
Status  Name                 Description                                                    
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
S       at                   Queues jobs for later execution                                
        matio                Library for reading and writing matlab files                   
        matio_debuginfo      Library for reading and writing matlab files (debug info)      
        openjdk11_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk12_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk13_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk14_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk15_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk16_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk17_default    An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        openjdk8_default     An open-source implementation of the Java Platform, SE         
        texlive_mathscience  TeX Collection: Mathematics, natural sciences, computer scienc…
~>


As I installed and after started to try out, but as at daemon/service - atd - had not run, I got error message as it seems does not run.
Checked with ps, it was true.

This way I started - manually - using nohup, I could see its team with ps

~> ps atd
Team                                                  Id #Threads  Gid  Uid 
/boot/system/bin/atd                               50626        1  106 1004 

Thread                                   Id    State Prio    UTime    KTime
atd                                   50626      zzz   10        1        6 
~>

It started successfully - it went as expected.

However,

is there a way to launch it automatically as a service ?

17

The package includes a script that should start it at boot, but it does not start as soon as you install the package. You must reboot first. After that, you should be able to see a job using the launch_roster command, for example: launch_roster info x-vnd.at-atd

1 Like
18

Ah, OK, I’m a dummy finally, it seems.

I expected to have it - without a reboot.
Ok so it is enough to run actually as is - I will check it at next reboot.

Now I have both the available scheduler items, as I set up the Cronie crontab as well I just had not added any jobs yet.

Thanks for your answer - and thanks also for whom who made at/atd available on Haiku ! :chocolate_bar:

:nerd_face:

19

I was the one that recently updated cronie and added the at recipe. I’m not sure I want to take credit for the at recipe because it was a really quick hack job on the source code in order to make it work. I need to go back and redo it at some point.

Also, the new cronie package now includes a startup script, similar to atd. You can use launch_roster info x-vnd.cronie-crond to get information about it.

1 Like
20

Okki-dokki.

I assume this also needs a reboot to be registered, as actually …

~> launch_roster info x-vnd.at-atd
launch_roster: Could not get target or job info for "x-vnd.at-atd": Name not found
~> launch_roster info x-vnd.cronie-crond
launch_roster: Could not get target or job info for "x-vnd.cronie-crond": Name not found
~>

I would re-check once I rebooted Haiku.

Thanks for info and update on it.

Also you can take the credit
as at command worked on programs - I could start them scheduled.
Also for myself it was a good round – learnt the atq and atrm commands … visiting an at command wiki page.
… after jobs had not worked for me, at least as I rmembered it should be done … so later I must re-iterate to grok into my puffer :))