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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)
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