$Id: README,v 1.2 2004/05/06 00:15:40 hackworth Exp $ Chronic A constraints-based, opportunistic scheduler in the spirit of ``cron'' Introduction Chronic is a constraints-based, opportunistic, application-level scheduler. Unlike cron, that schedules according to a time specification, Chronic schedules tasks when specified constraints are met. In other words, Chronic schedules during a window of opportunity when the circumstances are favorable. The original motivation for Chronic was for me to be able to schedule high-impact, recurring tasks like updatedb, emerge rsync, webalizer when I was away from the computer, and my computer mostly idling. This proved to be useful enough to abstract the notion of a "constraint" and build an opportunistic scheduler that schedules according to combinations of arbitrary constraints. The current version of Chronic natively contains the following constraints: System Inactivity, Disk I/O & Load Average. Other constraints planned for new future include: Network IO activity, cron (which emulates cron), and existence of new files under a directory. Availability Chronic is distributed through CPAN (http://cpan.org) and through SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/chronic/) The latest development version can be checked out of SourceForge CVS. Installation Chronic is written in Perl and requires a recent version of perl5 interpreter. If you are not running a stone age unix, a perl5 interpreter should already be installed on your system. Otherwise, you can find one at http://www.cpan.org. Follow the following instructions to build and install Chronic. tar zxvf Chronic-v.vv.tar.gz cd Chronic-v.vv perl Makefile.PL make su make install ``chronicd'' should now be installed on your system. Usage Chronic tasks and constraints are specified in a ``chrontab'' file located either in /etc/chrontab or under $HOME/.chrontab. A sample chrontab is located under the docs directory inside the Chronic distribution. For further help, see the chronicd manpage. Author Vipul Ved Prakash License Chronic is distributed under the Artistic License. See ARTISTIC for details.