Felix Crux

Technology & Miscellanea

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In general, the more I learn about systemd’s features, and the more functionality I migrate, the more I appreciate the project. It really does provide wonderfully flexible facilities for managing processes in a way that gets most things right.

However there are a few warts, and at least one feature that I just don’t really see any benefit to using over the traditional approach: timers. They seem to add a lot of overhead and ceremony over what plain old cron requires, for little to no benefit (at least for my use-cases so far). Am I missing something?

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Many years ago I laboriously ripped a collection of CDs (and a few cassettes) into digital files. It was already clear at the time that I wouldn’t want to lug discs around and that these newfangled “MP3 players” were on to something good.

Unfortunately, the hard drive space required to store my collection in a lossless format was far out of reach for me at the time, so I resigned myself to keeping everything as lossy low-bitrate MP3s. Later, a new free/open-source and patent-unencumbered format called Ogg Vorbis turned up on the scene, and my enthusiasm for it overpowered my horror at re-encoding from one lossy format to another, so I gritted my teeth at the quality degradation and converted everything.

Now in the present, Vorbis has been surpassed by Opus, FLAC exists, hard drives are cheap, and it’s time to start over.

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…or at least the best one I’ve managed to come up with.

The venerable cron utility has some well-known shortcomings, chief among which is how difficult it is to monitor the health and output of scheduled tasks. The default setup tries to email output, but on a typical laptop, desktop workstation, or even on many servers, it’s common to not have a working system-wide mailer configuration. Many users therefore set up “wrapper” scripts that handle logging, time­stamping, and so forth. This is the best one I’ve managed to come up with.