[Techtalk] incrontab

[Miriam English]

Hi Meryll,

This sounded interesting so I looked on the net to see what I could 
find. The website seems to have changed its name a couple of times a few 
years ago and then disappeared. It may be somewhere else on the net, but 
I found a copy of the original site on the Internet Archive at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130602173705/http://inotify.aiken.cz/?section=inotify&page=about&lang=en

The software now seems to exist solely on github at:
https://github.com/ar-/incron

Googling for "inotify cron system" or "incron" found some pages, but not 
a lot.

One thing you might be interested in is "watcher" another program that 
is similar in aim, but with the added ability to recursively watch 
directories. It uses python and its setup file does take comments.
http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2011-01/07-watcher_a_recursive_incron_alternative

The writer of that article, Andreas Gohr, forked watcher to remove 
dependency on YAML and simplify it.

original watcher by Greggory Hernandez:
https://github.com/gregghz/Watcher

fork by Andreas Gohr
https://github.com/splitbrain/Watcher

Cheers,

	- Miriam

On 05/11/15 04:12, Meryll Larkin wrote:
> I-notify cron  aka inode cron  aka incron  is a fairly newish program
> available on/for most Linux distros (I think) with kernels  2.6.13 or more
> recent.
>
> I'm using it  to replace something that disappeared a long time ago called a
> sesme scheduler - of course every script/configuration on the replacement
> FTP/SFTP server is going to be refactored... its only 300 accounts.
>
> I'm curious if anyone has had any experiences with incrontab as I've run
> into some unexpected behavior and I haven't found good documentation on the
> web - BTW, if you DO find good documentation on the web, please point me to
> it.
>
> incrontab is supposed to be similar to cron except that file-events trigger
> the items listed rather than clock time.  I've gotten it working on my
> server (yay!) so this isn't about troubleshooting as much as it is about me
> wanting to hear from other people about technique ideas.
>
> For example, unlike crontab, the incrontab file does not accept comment
> lines (!).  This is problematic because I won't be the maintainer (I've
> given notice), and the folks who will be maintaining it are "a little light"
> in their Linux skills, and lazy about reading documentation.  Before I dish
> the company up a piece of well-deserved karma, I still have to be me .. and
> I'm a little OCD about leaving stuff the best way possible.  I would create
> a script a wrapper for this (with an alias in /root/.bashrc) , but I've got
> a limited amount of time and 300 accounts to configure.  Any ideas?
>
> My OS is RedHat Enterprise 6.7  and I see absolutely NOTHING related to
> incron in /var/log/syslog (doesn't exist on RHE) and NOTHING in
> /var/log/messages.  I do see some logging in /var/log/cron  but I would like
> to give incrontab its own dedicated log.  In the process of getting it to
> work initially, I wrote my own logger which I could put into /var/log and
> then arrange for log rotation, but is there an easier way?
>
> I think I am going to need to run incrontab as root because much of what I
> need to do with it is copying data files from one home directory to another
> and then changing ownership.  Unless anyone has a suggestion that might be
> more secure?
>
> Finally, if anyone has any really cool incrontab examples, I'd love to hear
> about/see them.
>
> thanks all,
>
> Meryll Larkin
>
>
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-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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