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What does cron actually do?

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What does cron actually do?
Hi

Can someone explain to me exactly what the cron job actually does?

Regards

Stoosh
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Re: [Stoosh] What does cron actually do? In reply to
It's more of a *nix thing. It runs command(s) at a specified interval. In the windows world, it's like the windows scheduler thing.

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] What does cron actually do? In reply to
Hi Brewt

Sorry, I should have been clearer in my question. What I wanted to know is what does it run? Why is it run ever two minutes? How does this affect the running of Gossamer Mail?

Regards

Stoosh
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Re: [Stoosh] What does cron actually do? In reply to
In Reply To:
Sorry, I should have been clearer in my question. What I wanted to know is what does it run? Why is it run ever two minutes? How does this affect the running of Gossamer Mail?

A cron job can basically run anything. The cron file can include any number of cron jobs. Each line in the cron file is a different cron job, that can be set to run something at a specific time(s), on a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc schedule.

With gossamer mail you're simply adding a new cron job that runs the gossamer mail collection script every two minutes.

You could equally have another cron job that runs a rebuild on your LinkSQL directory once a day at 11.00pm.

Hope that helps?

r
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Re: [Stoosh] What does cron actually do? In reply to
For Gossamer Mail, it depends on how you have it set up. If you use a catch all (which is how most people use Gossamer Mail), then you'll need incoming.pl to run every x minutes to get the new mail from the catch all account, as well as outgoing.pl to send out bounced messages and such.

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] What does cron actually do? In reply to
Thank you all for your help. Smile

Stoosh