Once upon a time, I started watching both Naruto and One Piece ;since they were both well regarded shonen fighting shows, I expected toenjoy them more or less equally. Instead and rather to my surprise, Isoon lost interest in One Piece but kept watching Naruto for muchlonger. Afterwards, I spent some time thinking about why and what thedifference between the two shows was, because it was not as simple asdisliking one set of characters while liking the other.

I eventually decided that the crucial difference was

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