(resending because I can't spell. :/ Sorry for the noise.)
Hi Pedro,
Pedro Zorzenon Neto wrote:
> After upgrading to squeeze and answering "yes" to install question of
> using dash as default shell for non-interactive users, all my cronjobs
> that use $RANDOM variable to delay some random seconds of running time
> stopped working.
I don't think this functionality belongs in dash. For example, I
find that the "sleep" command in
> Example of a simple cronjob which runs with a random delay of
> 0 ~ 327 seconds (to prevent network peaks of all the machines):
>
> */30 * * * * sleep $(($RANDOM/100)) && do_something_network_related
is better written (more portably and more intuitively) as
sleep $(awk 'BEGIN {srand(); printf "%d\n", rand()*327}')
or
awk 'BEGIN { srand(); system("sleep " int(rand() * 327)) }'
even though this is a little longer.
On the other hand, I would definitely like a way for users to be able
to easily choose a different shell to be used by cron, so they would
be less at the mercy of the cruel sysadmin. What do you think?
Thanks for writing,
Jonathan
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