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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/sshdconfig 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
I run systemd with a different sshd service port and that’s all I changed
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
Yeah and they actually added some usability in the form of that utility helping you debug what you’re doing. Pretty nice!
Just write your own initialization system in bash. It is more reliable and less bloated.
It is literally happening this year.
24th is Tuesday. 1st of January is Wednesday and as a bonus Jan 6 is also a holiday in my country and that’s Monday.
So from dec 22 to jan 6 i can be home by using just 6 days off
It is, but they searched starting in 2025. Skipping this one.
The 25th is a Wednesday, not a Tuesday like he was wanting. Tuesday is nice because you get a four-day weekend without using any days off. (Though, usually you’d get the next off if it was a Monday or Sunday or whatever.) I think the best is Friday or Monday because then New Year’s gives you a three-day weekend too.
systemd is the future, and the future has been here for over a decade and yet old Unix and BSD purists still cry about it
I have one simple thing to say to the downvoters: I am not using a minicomputer from 1970, why should I be bound by the limits set then?
They are also still complaining about PulseAudio, despite Pipewire having mostly replaced it, while spending hours fiddling with ALSA to use their headphones.
I wouldn’t cry about it if it wasn’t so God awful to work with
In what way?
I’ve felt like systemd has been a breeze compared to the hodgepodge of different stuff that preceded it. Now most distros have it mostly the same way, tools are well documented, things works together. It wasn’t always like that from what I remember
Yeah, I’m also one of these people silently enjoying systemd and wayland. Every now and then there’s fuzz on one of these. I shrug, and move on still enjoying both of them.
In the UK, if Christmas or New Year falls on a weekend, a seperate equivalent holiday is made during the week to compensate.
Wait, do other countries not do this? So if a public holiday falls on a Saturday it doesn’t get pushed to Monday?
Don’t do that in Norway either - just bad luck if the holidays happen to land on a weekend. On the other hand, we have five weeks of paid vacation, and holidays are not counted into those, I’m not sure how that’s done in other countries?
Germany doesn’t do this, but the minimum, when all holidays fall on the worst possible days, is more than the number of holidays in the UK.
Netherlands doesn’t do this, and we have less holidays then UK haha
So even when you lose you win.
Same for lots of jobs here.
Honestly, Wednesday and Thursday are the worst days for Christmas for those of us who also get Christmas Eve because they’re the only days that don’t result in 4 days in a row off from work.
If it’s on a Friday, we get Thursday through Saturday. If it’s on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, they give us Friday through Monday, and if it’s on a Tuesday, they give us Saturday through Tuesday.
But this year, we’re off Saturday and Sunday, work Monday, are off Tuesday and Wednesday, and return to work on Thursday.
It’s the same total number of days off, but it’s way less useful - especially if travel is involved.
Awesome!
This is true for all public holidays in the UK, there’s a (usually) fixed number of public holidays but the dates are flexible.
They’re also included in the minimum 28 days paid time off too, meaning if you’re a full time worker and have to work on a bank holiday your employer is legally required to offer an extra day off somewhere else instead, either a fixed date or added to your holiday allowance. Conversely, the “extra” day off you get when a monarch keels over may be subtracted from your holiday allowance for the year. This is also why my employer is allowed to follow English bank holidays despite having next to no presence in England; the number is fixed but the dates are not.
but the UK has the fewest public holidays in Europe. In Germany we have 9-13 but don’t get a day off if a public holiday is on a weekend. And we have a minimum of 20/24 days of holiday on top
me: systemd is not that bloated
systemd:
You need a calendar and time handling anyways for logging purposes and to set timers correctly. It’s likely not that much extra work exposing that functionality.
No, UNIX philosophy demands that every single one of those things is one or more separate things and that half of them are poorly or not at all maintained. Just like God intended.
Finding the next super holiday is a core system feature I could survive without. 🎉
Well, date time stuff for a system working with timers and scheduling actions might be pretty useful…
That’s not what it’s there for. It can also be used that way.
I think this is for setting date oriented timers
Try scheduling a cron tab job to run a task on dates defined that way.
But that’s not what I need and the world revolves around me…
Ahh, you made my day!
systemd is a great operating system, it just lacks a decent text editor.
Good thing it’s editor agnostic so everybody can do the right thing in the end and choose nano
Funny way to misspell vim
Micro anyone? :D
the only reason im not using it is that it makes copying from terminal impossible
It will copy to the clipboard if possible. You can probably get it working with a bit of tinkering: https://github.com/zyedidia/micro/blob/master/runtime/help/copypaste.md
ed is the standard text editor.
Emacs, but I only use 'M-x butterfly C-M-c`
Enough people mention it that I’ve jumped over to helix
Eyy, helix mentioned! The only editor that can handle the 50k LoC files at work.
alias systemd-texted=microHave you tried emacs with evil mode? It’s a bit slow, not as slow as VS code or anything, but not really fast. But it’s basically neovim but you get to use lisp to configure it instead of lua
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
This plays some kind of role in the debate of systemd being good or not. I’m not sure if goes in the good column or the bad column, but I know it goes into a column.
I think it depends which side of the debate one is on?
I am typically in the group saying “systemd is overlarge with too many responsibilities” but this capability makes perfect sense for its job running services. Probably the good column.
This kinda functionality is surprisingly apropos to a problem I have a work, I realize. And yet, I have k8s. More and more I am appreciating the niche systemd can play with pets instead of cattle and wished corps weren’t jumping to managed k8s and all of that complexity it entails immediately.
You can run systemd (or cron) inside a pod for scheduling and call the kubernetes API from there to run jobs and stuff. Not sure if this helps you, but it can be easy to overlook.
haha, yeah I am well aware I could do something like that. Unfortunately, once you start working for larger companies, your options for solutions to problems typically shrink dramatically and also need to fit into neat little boxes that someone else already drew. And our environment rules are so draconian, that we cannot use k8s to its fullest anyhow. Most of the people I work with have never actually touched k8s, much less any kind of server oriented UNIX. Thanks for the advice though.
Too bad about its failure as an init system, though.
This just like Emacs all over again!
No, emacs is superior
What, Emacs is a successful init system https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE
No, nobody forces you to use emacs at gunpoint.
Some emacs evangelicals would like to.
Whoever forced you? distros wanting a stable system?
You must be either the very old get off my lawn type or very young and edgy. Everyone else in between likes systemd, one of the best things that happened to GNU/Linux in a while.
If by failure you mean every system under the sun using it
I don’t think they are using popularity as a metric. But I think the functionality of it is also very good, so dunno what their gripe is.
$ systemd-analyze calendar tomorrow Failed to parse calendar specification 'tomorrow': Invalid argument Hint: this expression is a valid timestamp. Use 'systemd-analyze timestamp "tomorrow"' instead? $ systemd-analyze timestamp tuesday Failed to parse "tuesday": Invalid argument Hint: this expression is a valid calendar specification. Use 'systemd-analyze calendar "tuesday"' instead?ಠ_ಠ
$ for day in Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun; do TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar "$day 02-29"|tail -2; done Next elapse: Mon 2044-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 19 years 4 months left Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 3 years 4 months left Next elapse: Wed 2040-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 15 years 4 months left Next elapse: Thu 2052-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 27 years 4 months left Next elapse: Fri 2036-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 11 years 4 months left Next elapse: Sat 2048-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 23 years 4 months left Next elapse: Sun 2032-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 7 years 4 months left
(It checks out.)
Surprisingly its calendar specification parser actually allows for 31 days in every month:
$ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-29' && echo OK || echo not OK Original form: 02-29 Normalized form: *-02-29 00:00:00 Next elapse: Tue 2028-02-29 00:00:00 UTC From now: 3 years 4 months left OK $ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-30' && echo OK || echo not OK Original form: 02-30 Normalized form: *-02-30 00:00:00 Next elapse: never OK $ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-31' && echo OK || echo not OK Original form: 02-31 Normalized form: *-02-31 00:00:00 Next elapse: never OK $ TZ=UTC systemd-analyze calendar '02-32' && echo OK || echo not OK Failed to parse calendar specification '02-32': Invalid argument not OKOh fuck. I’ll use this from now on. Except for if I won’t use it next week. Then I’ll forget about it because my memory is a damn sieve.
Use a systemd timer to send yourself a reminder. Discoverd them recently myself and honestly liking them more than cron.
Just take the next step and make a text file you dump all these commands into and then forget about in a week. When you randomly stumble across it years from now you’ll be able to say “wow, I could have used this 10 months ago if I remembered it existed!”
I keep a persistent “sticky note” (in KDE) drop down on my top bar where I copy/paste important commands, scripts, etc.
I actually remember to use it sometimes.
I make a separate text file per command so I can search them!
Which I dont.
We can store those text files in a terminal and search for them from the command line with man command!
I usually print these out and put them in a safe deposit box at a bank so I never lose them
I feel you. It’s however gotten a lot better since I turned some of these commands into abbreviations. They’re aliases that expands in place, more or less. Fish has them natively, I personally use zsh-abbr.
Fish is super useful, but I usually only start it up if I’m having trouble finding or remembering a command.
Yeah, it’s a good shell. I’ve found the lack of compatibility with some bash tools to be inconvenient enough that I just went back to zsh and found alternatives for the parts that I liked about it. Works well enough for me.
I’m relatively new to Linux in general (have only been on it for about a year and a half, but have taken to it like a fish to water), so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but what are some benefits to using zsh over bash? Are there any cons?
Thanks! I hate this. 🖤
That’s pretty clever.
