+COMMENT: -- org --

+TITLE: crontest

+AUTHOR: Ari Russo

+DATE: 2010-10-28 Wed

+TEXT: ruby command line tool/library for testing cron jobs

+KEYWORDS: cron, crontest, cron-test, crontab, linux, unix, test, tasks, jobs

+LANGUAGE: en

+LINK_HOME: http://github.com/arirusso/crontest

• Summary

Ruby libary and command line tool for testing cron jobs.

• Description

Execute an (almost) immediate and transient cron job using the same environment that is used to run your user's crontab.

• Requires

  • [[http://github.com/soveran/clap][clap]]

• Usage

  : gem install crontest

to run crontest from the command line:

: crontest 'echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt' &

or, to call from another ruby program

: require 'crontest'
: Crontest.run("echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt")

these will both run =echo hello! > MY_CRON_TEST.txt= as a cron job. it can take up to a minute to run as cron's timing resolution is one minute.

crontest will create a backup file of your current crontab (cron-backup-[timestamp]) in the directory where directory you run it, and then restore it.

Options:

pass in options from the command line or Crontest.run(command, options)

: --no-backup : -n : :backup => false no backup file

: -v : :verbose => true verbose output

• Caution

I highly encourage you to keep a separate backup of your crontab before trying this tool as it is brand new and relatively untested.