[Techtalk] incrontab

[Bonnie King]

inotify is cool. But to be honest, I've had little but frustration in
implementing anything with it. Your use cases aren't mine, though.

I did a quick presentation on inotify once, here are the slides:

https://github.com/misterbonnie/presentations/blob/master/fermi_lug/inotify.pdf

You might have better luck with some of the other inotify-related tools
(inotifywait, inotifywatch, lsync, the Python library) since incrontab
appears to be limited.


On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org>
wrote:

> 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
> -----
> Website: http://miriam-english.org
> Blogs:   http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org
>          http://miriam-e.livejournal.com
>
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>
>
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-- 
Bonnie King
773-799-4608