cron-wrap For Linux

“Obviously, you're not a golfer”. But you are probably a sysadmin.

The cron-wrap script is meant to be used as a wrapper for cron jobs. The idea here is that you use this script to wrap whatever would be a normal cronjob for you to perform functions based on what options are specified. I think this is best explained with an example.

I have a cronjob that runs every minute. First, I don't want “overlap”, a second instance is run while the first one is still running, if a single run takes a long time. Solved. The nature of my cronjob (just a script that is being run) is such that there will be an occasional failure, but an occasional failure, in this case, can be ignored. Instead, I only want to know when the script has failed 5 times in a row. Solved. By default, cwrap.py will also swallow all the output for the occasional fails, but I at least want a record of those failures so that I can determine whether the intermittent fails are happening more frequently and constitute a different problem. Solved (by turning on the syslog option).

This script may not be useful for everyone, but for some out there, it will save you a lot of time, effort and probably emails in your inbox.

Full documentation can be found in the man page or here: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=programming:python:cwrap