[stiff]

I really hope someone will succeed in rolling out a good and eventually popular replacement for Cron, because Cron completely sucks.

The crontab file has a weird syntax, that in some respects seems to look like a shell script, but isn't really one and some shell constructs work, other not. There are lots of ways you can make a mistake in writing the commands to be executed in a way that the command you intended won't run but will fail silently and you won't get any trace of an error happening. It is hard to even extract some common parts of commands and put them into a variable. I wasted hours and hours debugging weird cron errors. One case was where the crontab of one of the users was moved over to be the system crontab and strangely didn't work. Well, turns out the system wide crontab has one more field, but cron will not signal an error even in an obvious case like this, it will just fail silently (and this is the thing cron is really good at in my experience).