Ellipsis-Cron

Ellipsis-Cron is an Ellipsis extension to manage cron jobs.

Features

• Easy job management
• Fast job addition and removal
• Disabling and re-enabling of available jobs
• Manual job execution

Install

Requirements: Ellipsis

# With ellipsis installed
$ ellipsis install ellipsis-cron

# Without ellipsis installed
$ curl -Ls ellipsis.sh | PACKAGES='ellipsis-cron' sh

The .ellipsis/bin folder should be added to your path. If it isn't you will need to symlink .ellipsis/bin/ellipsis-cron to a folder that is in your path.

Usage

Adding, removing and showing cron jobs

To add a job you simply call ellipsis-cron add followed by a name, time, and command. Please take special care of escaping time and command strings!

# Add job to run 'ellipsis update' on startup
$ ellipsis-cron add ellipsis.update '@reboot' '$HOME/.ellipsis/bin/ellipsis update >/dev/null 2>&1'

# Add job to run 'ellipsis update' on each monday at 1pm
$ ellipsis-cron add ellipsis.update '13 * * * 1' '$HOME/.ellipsis/bin/ellipsis update >/dev/null 2>&1'

Display currently added jobs with ellipsis-cron list. This can optionally be followed by a job name to display a single job.

To remove a job you call ellipsis-cron remove <job name>. You can remove all jobs at once by using all as job name.

# Remove ellipsis.update job
$ ellipsis-cron remove ellipsis.update

# Remove all jobs
$ ellipsis-cron remove all

# The shorter 'rm' command is also supported
$ ellipsis-cron rm ellipsis.update

Change a job

Ellipsis-cron provides three functions to alter already added cron jobs.

• rename : Rename a job
• chtime : Alter the time interval of a job
• chcmd : Alter the command of a job

# Rename ellipsis.update to dotfiles.update
$ ellipsis-cron rename ellipsis.update dotfiles.update

# Change ellipsis.update to run each monday at midnight
$ ellipsis-cron chtime ellipsis.update '* * * * 1'

# Change ellipsis.update command to output to a file
$ ellipsis-cron chcmd ellipsis.update '$HOME/.ellipsis/bin/ellipsis update >/tmp/ellipsis.update.log 2>&1`

Enabling or disabling a job

Instead of removing jobs when they are not needed for a certain amount of time, you can simply disable them with ellipsis-cron disable <job name>. To re enable the job you call ellipsis-cron enable <job name>.

# Disable ellipsis.update job
$ ellipsis-cron disable ellipsis.update

# Enable ellipsis.update job
$ ellipsis-cron enable ellipsis.update

Run a job manually

If you need to run a job manually just call ellipsis-cron run <job name>. This will run the job in your current terminal. This can be very convenient for debugging purposes. (Note, this will use the current $PATH, not the one used by the cron daemon)

# Run ellipsis.update manually
$ ellipsis-cron run ellipsis.update

Manual crontab editing

Please be careful when manually editing the crontab file! Ellipsis-cron uses special comments to keep track of jobs. However, if you don't alter comments starting with # Ellipsis-cron... and lines following these comments you should be fine!

# Manualy editing the crontab file
$ ellipsis-cron edit

Docs

Please consult the docs for more information.

Specific parts that could be off interest:

• Installation
• Usage

Development

Pull requests welcome! New code should follow the existing style (and ideally include tests).

Suggest a feature or report a bug? Create an issue!

Author(s)

You can thank these people for all there hard work.

License

Ellipsis-Cron is open-source software licensed under the MIT license.