>> One problem with a standard cron approach is that you would have to
>> specify in advance when to run each script.  In many cases you don't
>> want your machine to be flooded with large tasks all at once, so you
>> would have to guess how long each script would take to complete, and
>> that tends to be both difficult to guess and variable.
>
>If the scripts in question are to be run on the same schedule as one
>another (as the old /etc/daily, for example, does), you can do
>
>15     3       *       *       *       script1; script2; script3
>
>Or, of course, you can write a wrapper script, which amounts to
>reinventing /etc/daily.

one other thing to remember is that the wrapper script, which we now
call daily or security or weekly or monthly (why don't we have a
yearly?) does other things *around* the "jobs" it runs, like creating
a secure temporary work directory, making sure it gets cleaned up,
mailing the report in total to a specified address, etc.

yes, you could make all that happen from cron, but (a) cron does not
do all those little things, and (b) cron should *not* do all those
little things.

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