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Periodic schedulers come in many shapes and sizes but one constant is cron, the scheduling daemon that will run programs and scripts at arbitrary times or intervals. A number of different cron implementations exist: although vixie-cron may be the most popular, there are other similar programs such as dcron, fcron, anacron, and others.
Write yourself some bash scripts that will automate much of the work for you. This way you won't have to spend so much time in front of the computer. I usually install the system, go watch a movie, then run some bash scripts and grab a bite to eat while the scripts do the work for me.
Taking frequent computer breaks can save you from a debilitating repetitive strain injury (RSI). However, if you're like most people, you probably get caught up in your work and forget to take breaks as often as you should. The Workrave desktop applet can keep you on track.
"If you spend a lot of time creating new shell scripts, be they plain shell or scripting languages such as perl or python, then it can be very useful to make new scripts be executable by default. Here we'll show two simple recipes for GNU Emacs and vim to do just that..."
Do you spend most of your day with five or more Firefox tabs open as you research on the Internet? Then you're probably a candidate for Tabs Open Relative.
Scheduling services with cron and similar tools is great for repetitive tasks but inconvenient for one-time tasks that only need to be accomplished once. For tasks that only need to be accomplished once, use the at command.
Backing up your computer is important. Don't be the sucker who loses important files and has to deal with it afterwards! In this how-to, you will learn about using rsync and lftp, writing your own scripts and adding them to crontab and of course, backing up to your external storage, NAS and also a remote server running Linux.
Repetitive Strain Injury is something we should all avoid. If you spend a lot of time using computers, there is a potential for RSI to become a problem if you aren’t aware of it and aren’t proactive in taking regular breaks.
This article is a short introduction to cron jobs, their syntax, and how to set them up. A cron job is a scheduled task that is executed by the system at a specified time/date.