crontab entry environment variables [PSARC/2007/503 FastTrack timeo

[Bill Sommerfeld]

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 15:06 -0700, Don Cragun wrote:
> 	As stated before, other ways of doing this are to have these
> environment settings affect only the single following crontab entry.  I
> suggested that long ago, but it was rejected.  

Other implementations of cron/crontab already support a very similar
syntax extension and it would be confusing to people familiar with the
other implementations for environment variable settings to only affect a
single entry.

> Either of these would allow strictly conforming applications to share
> crontabs with users using the extension without affect the conforming
> application behavior.  (Again, no knob required.)

The alternate extension you propose strikes me as more awkward to use
(you have to keep repeating settings); it seems more realistic to simply
document that if you use the extension, you need to watch out for side
effects.

					- Bill