cron

Why some scripts in the cron.hourly directory do not become executed

Because I have a very basic mp3 player that cannot play back anything but ISO-standard mp3s, I often need to re-encode podcasts which my podcast-catcher downloads (I use Amarok). I created bash scripts to re-encode all downloaded mp3s and to generate a new RSS feed based on the directory content where the re-encoded mp3s get stored. However, the scripts did not get executed every hour and the reason was their naming ("podacst_downsampling.sh").

Editing the crontab

We have a shared directory (/home/shared) on our computer and a usergroup called "shared". The purpose is that we put things there that should be accessible (including writable) to several users of the system. If one user puts a file there, it can be read by others but not e.g. deleted. In order to fix this, we edited the crontab to execute every 5 minutes the following two commands:

chgrp -R shared /home/shared
chmod -R 744 /home/shared

In order to do this we edited (as root of course) the /etc/crontab file by adding the line:

How to backup mysql databases (mysqlhotcopy, mysqldump)

There are different possibilities. If you have access to the machine where mysql is running, you should use:
mysqlhotcopy On our RedHat 8 server you just type:
/usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy --user=root --password=sdjksjd journal /path/to/backup/directory Alternatively:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --user=username -p phpgedview >phpgedview The path of the command is specific for the mysql install on a MacOS X machine.