Okay this is cool and all, but why would systemd have a calendar?
(also how do i do this)
Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.
Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)
I’m sorry but Cron is really easy, of all systems.
Try using systemd with an ssh server that you want to have running on a non standard port. On non systemd it’s a 15 second ordeal while on systemd I don’t even know where to start, I pushed it out of my memories. It’s something something create files here, restart demons there, removing other files, it is WAY WAY over complicated
What do you mean? You literally just change the /etc/sshd config to point at a different port do you not?
Oh yeah, without systemd that’s all there is to it. With systemd, however, port management is taken out of the ssh config and is done how it was decades ago
Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.
Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.
Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.
Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming
Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack
Just write your own initialization system in bash. It is more reliable and less bloated.
This is basically just a way nicer, more flexible cron syntax being dressed up as something ridiculous. There are legitimate reasons for wanting something like this, like running some sort of resource heavy disk optimization the first Friday evening of every month or something.
Systemd ignored my calendar override for the builtin raid scanner, so every week my server would chug to a halt to scan the entire array.
In true systemd fashion, the documentation could not explain this behavior, so I had to make a full copy override instead of a merge override because reasons.
Did setting OnCalendar to the empty string not work? https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/479745
