On 5 June 2013 11:08, Christian Kastner <deb...@kvr.at> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > >> It seems that the following Debian commit which introduces a >> temporary file has an unfortunate side-effect: >> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-cron/pkg- >> cron.git;a=commitdiff;h=e61050367866fb1b627e2c004d370914eced70cb >> >> Indeed even if cron has nothing to do, a temporary file is always >> created in /tmp and immediatly deleted. >> >> I am trying to reduce the power consumption of my server and this >> patch had the effect of waking-up the hard-drive every hour. >> >> Maybe it is possible to prevent the temporary file creation if cron >> has nothing to do ? > > With "nothing to do", do mean "no jobs are run" or "jobs do not create > output"? > > In any case, a simple solution would be to have a tmpfs on /tmp. This > is trivial to do with Wheezy (see /etc/default/tmpfs), and still easy > with Squeeze.
"nothing to do" = there is no job (cron.hourly is empty and users cron are empty) I can of course mount /tmp on a tmpfs, but it seems to me that it would be overkill (as cron is the only software I have which behaves like this). A better workaround would be for me to simply comment the line cron.hourly in /etc/crontab (as I don't have any hourly job). However it would more elegant for cron to skip this file creation in case there is no job to execute. This is only a minor bug though, but I spent quite a long time tracking it (especially given that only Debian users have this bug) so I thought that it may be useful to report it. Best regards, -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
