[ausjke]

Great read and definitely will keep this in my toolbox, the whole article is explaining why the below good when you need use cron:

15 * * * * ( flock -w 0 200 && sleep `perl -e 'print int(rand(60))'` && nice /command/to/run && date > /var/run/last_successful_run ) 2>&1 200> /var/run/cron_job_lock | while read line ; echo `date` "$line" ; done > /path/to/the/log || true