[mythtv-users] Alternatives to DataDirect?

[chris@cpr.homelinux.net]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 09:20:08AM -0400, Greg Estabrooks wrote:
>  An init script or some such that executes when the box comes up, and
> is intelligent enough to ensure that it only runs once per day would 
> probably be best.

There's a package called "anacron" (http://anacron.sourceforge.net/) 
that was developed for people who run Linux on laptops or other 
computers that have a lot of down-time.  It isn't a full replacement 
for cron as its scheduling granularity is one day.  The idea is that 
if you have tasks that are supposed to be run once a day, once a week 
or once a month (such as logrotate), you schedule those jobs in 
anacron.  When cron calls anacron, anacron checks to see if 24 hours 
(or 7 days, etc.) has elapsed since the last time the task was 
executed and, if so, runs it again.  In the case of mythfilldatabase, 
you would schedule it as a once-a-day event and it would run 
automatically if at least 24 hours had elapsed since the last run.  
The anacron schedule doesn't care about time of day, but you could 
prevent it from hosing zap2it by telling cron to only run anacron 
between 6AM and 11PM.  Unlike cron, anacron is not a stay-resident 
daemon, so it's easy to disable it during specific times of the day 
simply by not invoking it.

-- 
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and 
carrying the cross." - Sinclair Lewis (1935)