-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 2013-06-05 13:12, Saint Germain wrote: >>> 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"? > > "nothing to do" = there is no job (cron.hourly is empty and users > cron are empty) > > However it would more elegant for cron to skip this file creation > in case there is no job to execute.
Ah, but there is one job running: run-parts. The scripts in cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} are not processed by the cron daemon directly. Instead, the system crontab /etc/crontab contains schedules for calls to "run-parts /etc/cron.[interval]", and run-parts then processes those scripts. From cron's POV, there is always exactly 1 process being run. So another workaround for you would be to comment out the hourly stanza from /etc/crontab. Any other solution would be overly complex to implement, I'm afraid. > 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. I agree, thank you. > 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). (Off-topic, personal opinion: having a tmpfs on /tmp has many other benefits, eg: there is no need to clean the filesystem on boot. Most of the stuff in /tmp is probably going to be cached, ie in RAM, anyway) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAlGvrsoACgkQwSyarY0epjXFaQCg3PL4cROPSawxFfaRzHDGXUJl X9cAoI4EgvV4HH4z9K61+wkYcXARj9kF =P7UF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org