Re: [GENERAL] Re: [HACKERS] [Fwd: SGVLLUG Oracle and Informix on Linux]

At 23:36 +0300 on 24/7/98, Richard Lynch wrote:

> Well, let's try crontab -e and mess around to find out the answers to these
> questions. Or at least to see if I can just ignore this whole MAILTO thing
> for now. I can always do crontab -r and blow it away.
>
> Damn! What's this PICO thing? How do I make it use vi?
>
> Thank god for PICO's instructions so I know how to quit!
>
> man 5 crontab I know it said something about the editor, but now I don't
> see it...
>
> man 5 crontab Still don't see it... Oh. Duh.
>
> man crontab Ah. Okay, how do I set the VISUAL or EDITOR variable[s]?
> Which one do I set? Both? Is it, like, variant based on
> BSD/Linux/ATT/whatever?
>
> And if I do find out how to set it, how do I make it always stay set?
>
> Oh hell. Look at the time. I give up.
>
> Guess I'll just do vacuum by hand for now. Sigh.

I nearly fell off my chair laughing... You know, on my personal TODO list
there's a little item "Write crons for VACUUM", which has been there for
months, and I keep postponing it.

I hate cron. I shudder at the thought I'll have to use it, with its
environment variables (which are not read from .cshrc), its odd intervals
(how do you cron something for "every three days"?), its permissions and
current directory and whatnot...

Although I'm a Mac user, like Richard, I'm also a qualified unix sysadmin.
But whenever someone tells me "oh, just use awk/sed/cron/procmail", I
shudder.

It's like telling me, instead of having a report generator, to use perl and
write my reports. More time wasted, more debugging spent. When unix
standard tools have a user interface, this world will be a nicer place to
live.

Here we go back to the problem. The authors don't want or don't have time
to make automated vacuums. So they tell me to "DIY". "DIY" is acceptable in
free software, but isn't in commercial products. The break-even point is
not entirely on Postgres's side, all things considered.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma