coping with solaris cron

More and more, we’re eliminating Linux boxes in favor of Solaris. This is generally not a huge deal, but one of the niggling details has been Sun’s cron. It sucks. It sucks because it uses a constant as the subject of its alert messages. If you have a lot of servers running a lot of cron jobs, generating a lot of output, you end up with a display that looks like this:

 1 N Oct17 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 2 N Oct17 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 3 N Oct17 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 4 N Oct17 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 5 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 6 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 7 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 8 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
 9 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
10 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command
11 N Oct18 Super-User      (  7)   Output from "cron" command

Seriously?

So, I put in a change request to have this fixed. Deploying Vixie cron was going to be a massive pain (I was told) so instead we updated our use of puppet to ensure that our cronjobs were run by a wrapper script. I’m really happy with it, as it eliminates a few other crappy wrapper scripts and gets me what I wanted to begin with. There are a few internal modules used below, but it should be trivial to replace them with whatever you want. (I’ve removed a few constants, too.)

Maybe I’ll CPANize this later.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);
use Fcntl qw(:flock);
use Getopt::Long::Descriptive;
use ICG::SvcLogger;
use IPC::Run3 qw(run3);       
use String::Flogger qw(flog);
use Sys::Hostname::Long;
use Text::Template;
use Time::HiRes ();

my ($opt, $usage) = describe_options(
  '%c %o',
   [ 'command|c=s',   'command to run (passed to ``)', { required => 1 } ],
   [ 'subject|s=s',   'subject of mail to send (defaults to command)'    ],
   [ 'rcpt|r=s@',     'recipient of mail; may be given many times',      ],
   [ 'errors-only|E', 'do not mail if exit code 0, even with output',    ],
   [ 'sender|f=s',    'sender for message',                              ],
   [ 'jobname|j=s',   'job name; used for locking, if given'             ],
   [ 'lock!',         'lock this job (default: lock; --no-lock to not)',
                      { default => 1 }                                   ],
);

die "illegal job name: $opt->{jobname}\n"
  if $opt->{jobname} and $opt->{jobname} !~ m{\A[-a-z0-9]+\z};

my $rcpts   = $opt->{rcpt}
           || [ split /\s*,\s*/, ($ENV{MAILTO} ? $ENV{MAILTO} : '...') ];

my $host    = hostname_long;
my $sender  = $opt->{sender} || sprintf '%s@%s', ($ENV{USER}||'cron'), $host;

my $subject = $opt->{subject} || $opt->{command};
   $subject =~ s{\A/\S+/([^/]+)(\s|$)}{$1$2} if $subject eq $opt->{command};

my $logger  = ICG::SvcLogger->new({
  program_name => 'cronjob',
  facility     => 'cron',
});

my $lockfile = sprintf '.../cronjob.%s', $opt->{jobname} || md5_hex($subject);

goto LOCKED if ! $opt->{lock};

open my $lock_fh, '>', $lockfile or die "couldn't open lockfile $lockfile: $!";
flock $lock_fh, LOCK_EX | LOCK_NB or die "couldn't lock lockfile $lockfile";
printf $lock_fh "running %s\nstarted at %s\n",
  $opt->{command}, scalar localtime $^T;

LOCKED:

$logger->log([ 'trying to run %s', $opt->{command} ]);

my $start = Time::HiRes::time;
my $output;

$logger->log_fatal([ 'run3 failed to run command: %s', $@ ])
  unless eval { run3($opt->{command}, \undef, \$output, \$output); 1; };

my %waitpid = (
  status => $?,
  exit   => $? >> 8,
  signal => $? & 127,
  core   => $? & 128,
);

my $end = Time::HiRes::time;

unlink $lockfile if -e $lockfile;

my $send_mail = ($waitpid{status} != 0)
             || (length $output && ! $opt->{errors_only});

if ($send_mail) {
  require Email::Simple;
  require Email::Simple::Creator;
  require ICG::Sendmail;
  require Text::Template;

  my $template = do { local $/; <DATA> };
  my $body     = Text::Template->fill_this_in(
    $template,
    HASH => {
      command => \$opt->{command},
      output  => \$output,
      time    => \(sprintf '%0.4f', $end - $start),
      waitpid => \%waitpid,
    },
  );

  my $subject = sprintf '%s%s',
    $waitpid{status} ? 'FAIL: ' : '',
    $subject;

  my $email = Email::Simple->create(
    body   => $body,
    header => [
      To      => join(', ', @$rcpts),
      From    => qq{"cron/$host" <$sender>},
      Subject => $subject,
    ],
  );

  ICG::Sendmail->sendmail(
    $email,
    {
      to      => $rcpts,
      from    => $sender,
      archive => undef,
    }
  );
}

__DATA__
Command: { $command }
Time   : { $time }s
Status : { join('', flog('%s', \%waitpid)) }

Output :
{ $output || '(no output)' }
Written on October 18, 2008
🏷 cron
🐪 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming
🏷 solaris