Cron Job manipulation through Web Page

[siddhartha mulpuru]

On a given UNIX systems there is a CRONTAB with CRON entries. I would
like to develop a web page that would Display the entries, allow
Editing of an entry, allow searching for a specific entry in CRON for
a given USERID and Password. The returned page for each entry must
display the page in "laymens" english, not cryptically as found in
CRON (In other words a conversion must take place to and from the
format in CRON)

I wanted to know if anyone did something similar or had ideas about
how this could be implemented.


Thanks a lot for your time

Sid

 

[Clyde Ingram]

Siddharta,

I wanted to know if anyone did something similar or had ideas about
how this could be implemented.

Yes - I have tackled adding, deleting, and modifying a specific subset of
crontab entries for scheduling particular applications.
The front end was HTML & JavaScript, controlled by a CGI program (using
Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm, naturally) to manage several databases -- including
crontab.
Interesting problems included the usual bread-and-butter issues of
concurrent access (by multiple networked clients), file locking, cookies,
etc.

On the topic of the crontab format, I simpified matters by only letting the
user choose between daily, weekly, and monthly scheduling -- nothing more
powerful was necessay at the time. Also, my application managed its private
database including user specified schedules (hour:minute; day-or-week (if
weekly) or day-of-month (if monthly)). So the application never needed to
read or analyse or validate timing info from a raw crontab entry, merely
overwrite the crontab entry with the latest changes in its database, as
received via CGI. An unsophisticated and fairly common-place project.

How about you? Have you encountered any specific Perl (rather than CGI
authoring or database) problems that this news group might be happy to get
its teeth into? Without details, it is hard to know where to point you, but
you may get great value by starting with any of these:

http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/columns.html
http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/
http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/CGI/

Regards,
Clyde