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.
Damn and does it work as an init too? xD.
systemd is a great operating system, it just lacks a decent text editor.
alias systemd-texted=micro
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
ed is the standard text editor.
Emacs, but I only use 'M-x butterfly C-M-c`
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
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.
Have 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
No Christmas for 5 years?? Why are you doing this to us, systemd???
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!
Thanks! I hate this. 🖤
God, I only have one question…
Why?
I bet it’s for timers
Did you know the next Friday the 13th is in December? ChatGPT didn’t know it. (I had to give it an extra date.now for it to figure it out)
Oh 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?
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
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.
It is, but they searched starting in 2025. Skipping this one.
That’s actually really cool!
Finally we can put all the controversy around systemd to rest.
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 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.
I think it depends which side of the debate one is on?
That’s pretty clever.
Systemd. A tool created in search of problem.
The problem: incomprehensible init scripts
The solution is learn them.