[ubuntu-uk] 'Simple' cron job help...

[Tony Arnold]

Josh,

Josh Blacker wrote:
> Being a slight newbie, I'd appreciate some direction with this!
> 
> I have an open office file that I'm constantly updating and sharing
> with a friend. Emailing it to him every so often is a chore - what I
> want is a cron script to do this for me, say every evening. Any ideas?
> [As he's on a mac without oo.org, ideally it would save it as a pdf
> first...]

This is reasonably simple provided you have a few things set up first.
To send mail from a script you either need a perl script as previously
suggested, or you could install an MTA (mail transport agent) such
postfix and a command line client such as mail or mutt.

The MTA should be configured to use a 'smart host', i.e., all outgoing
mail is sent to the mail router of your ISP.

There are command line options to mail and mutt for sending a message
and including a file as an attachment.

Once you have that, then use 'crontab -e' to edit your crontab entry. I
suggest you put the mail commands in a script and invoke the script from
cron.

The bit I don't know how to do is to convert an OO.org file to PDF from
a script. Maybe someone else can chime in with this part.

Are you both modifying this document? Would a server running CVS or SVN
(subversion) be an alternative way of doing it? Maybe that's getting
more complicated than it needs to be.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold