The traditional way of specifying that cron should run a command everyten minutes is to write out a list of every minute that the command isto run on:

0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /some/command

Vixie cron introduced a shorthand notation for this: ' */10 '. We useit quite a lot, since it is very convenient; it is both shorter andmore explicit about what is really going on, which means

Unix has three sorts of manpages: excellent ones that clearly answeryour questions, good ones that answer your questions if you read themcarefully, and bad ones that aren't worth reading because they don'tanswer your questions (at least in a way that you can understand).

The first sort are rare and obvious when encountered, which means thatwhen you read a manpage you are generally trying to guess whether youare dealing with the second sort or the third sort. The problem is thatthere are significantly

Commentators on my earlier entry brought up usingTwitter for system status announcements and the like. I think that thismakes sense for a lot of places, but I don't think it makes sense forus, and it has to do with where our users are; not in a geographicalsense, but in a network and Internet sense.

For many Internet companies, your users are outside, on the generalInternet, trying to get 'in' to you, and so using a status reportingsystem that is outside