What's better for this particular task: a daemon or a CRON job with a simple program?

Question

I have a program that copies files from a network drive to a specific location per user. It needs to do this every 12 hours and it needs to start when the system (redhat linux) starts.

I was thinking about converting the program to a daemon and have it sleep for 12 hours, wake up, copy the files and go to sleep. However, is that an overkill?

What's better: a simple program that copies the files and then exits and call that from a CRON job every 12 hours or a daemon? what's better for the system?

thanks!

Answer 1

In my opinion, I would go with cron. Largely, because it's far less complicated and easier to implement.

The other option requires you putting effort into daemonizing the process, and creating a startup script for it. There's plenty that can go wrong there. And there's a solid chance that a bug or errant kill might cause the daemon to die. (are you going to make a cron process to check on your daemon?)

In cron, a good deal of that heavy lifting has already been handled by cron. It's a rocksolid daemon, it's got scheduling down pat, and if your script blows up, you'll get an E-Mail of the output.


--Christopher Karel