The K Desktop Environment

Kcron - The KDE Task Scheduler

What is Kcron?

Kcron is an application for scheduling programs to run in the background.  It is a graphical user interface to crontab and cron, the Unix system scheduler. 

Instead of manually editing a file that looks like this...
 
# Use Bourne shell
SHELL=/bin/sh
# Email program output to Paul
MAILTO=paul
# Backup database
5 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/backupdb
# Annoy Joe
0 22 * * 1-5 mail -s "It's 10PM" "Where are your kids?"

You use a graphical tool like this...

Screenshot as run by root user
Screenshot with themed KDE2

Installation

KCron is part of the K Desktop Environnment project. The source is in the KDE CVS server in the kdeadmin package.

KCron requires the folowing:

  • Qt 1.44 or higher
  • KDE 1.1.1 or higher
  • Cron and crontab, such as crontabs-1.7-6 and vixie-cron-3.0.1-33
  • POSIX compliant Unix, such as provided by glibc (some standard Unix system calls are made for localization of dates and times)

Download

Download Kcron.

Current and Planned Features

 
Feature Plan
Read/write crontab file 0.1
Display natural language description, such as "At 10:00PM, every Sun" 0.1
Display and edit environment variables and tasks  0.1
Provide icons, toolbar, status bar, and resizing window 0.1
Enable/disable environment variable or task 0.1
Provide editing of all users' crontabs and system crontab for root user 0.1
Cut/copy/paste 0.2
Right-mouse-click, context-sensitive menu 0.3
Determination of KDE icons for KDE tasks 0.5
"Run now" 0.5
New task wizard 0.6
Print 0.7
Import/export 0.8
Help 0.9
Complete documentation 1.0

Credits

KCron was initially based upon kcrontab developed by Michael Bialas and documented by David Klemm .

KCron acknowledges Paul Vixie for vixie-cron.

Interested in Helping?

About half of the code has no dependency on Qt or KDE whatsoever.  It does all of the crontab file i/o, parsing, tokenization, and natural language description.  It just uses C++, STL, crontab, and a few standard Unix system calls. 

I put the KDE front end on top of that.

I would also like to do a Gnome front end but I don't know about the time required to do it.  If interested in co-developing for Gnome, let me know.

Feedback

Bugs?  Suggestions?  Please email the author, Gary Meyer.

Last updated on November 1, 1999 by Gary Meyer.