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Easy use of periodic
Authored by: fab23 on Jul 26, '08 08:23:05AM
The whole periodic stuff probably comes from FreeBSD, as it is very familiar to me and does have man pages:
fabian@flashback:~$ apropos periodic
periodic(8)              - run periodic system functions
periodic.conf(5)         - periodic job configuration information
fabian@flashback:~$
To learn more about periodic use man 8 periodic for the program itself, or man 5 periodic.conf for the config file.

I guess two options would be helpful, for example if the computer is not running at nights, you can run periodic manually with the following commands at the appropriated time:

fabian@flashback:~$ sudo periodic daily
fabian@flashback:~$ sudo periodic weekly
fabian@flashback:~$ sudo periodic monthly
And if you do not want to create log files, you can change options in the /etc/periodic.conf file (does not exists and needs to be created). For example to send an e-mail instead, put the following lines into /etc/periodic.conf (change the e-mail address to your own):
daily_output="user@example.com"
weekly_output="user@example.com"
monthly_output="user@example.com"
daily_status_security_output="user@example.com"
Or you can send the log output to nirvana:
daily_output="/dev/null"
weekly_output="/dev/null"
monthly_output="/dev/null"
daily_status_security_output="/dev/null"
The defaults for all options are in /etc/defaults/periodic.conf (do not make any changes in this file). If you want to change something, just add the corresponding option to /etc/periodic.conf.

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