As of current OSMC (2021-12), the standard UNIX service cron is not installed by default. Otherwise, there might be tools expecting cron to be available. In my OSMC installation the two folder /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly are populated by default, but not processed (because cron is not installed).
Of course there is an easy workaround:
apt update
apt install cron
Nevertheless you will avoid user irritation if you provide cron by default.
Regards, Michael
This is a media center. I donāt know why we should need cron on it by default.
Itās in the OSMC App Store. What are you using under cron that youād expect from a standard installation?
Iām not aware of the OSMC app store.
My point is that there might be tools installed as part of OSMC which (silently) rely on cron, e. g fakertc (I myself even donāt know that program, but it has an entry within /etc/cron.hourly). Or apt which might do some daily housekeeping.
Anyhow I aggree with Smurphy, cron doesnār make much sense on a mediacenter. But in my installation kodi is installed on a raspberry pi 3 running 24/7 while kodi itself is active only once per week. From that perspective housekeeping tasks are valuable.
Itās only a suggestion to reduce user confusion for those users being accustomed to UNIX. And to them cron is really a standard utility.
Regards, Michael
I have headless Calibre running on mine and I have a couple of commands I like to run periodically to make sure everything is running as it should, cron helps with that. I also also have a cron job that runs rsync to back up my media collection. There are also kodi commands that I like to run periodically (eg to refresh my collection, clean the database), again I use cron.
Itās a pretty basic system management tool - why not include it?
Because many thousands of people would not use it on Media Center and for those using it executing the install command once would not harm.
I have calibre (headless) running on my NAS. Thatās where it should go.
When I was new to OSMC, got my first secondhand pi2 three weeks before pi3 was released, I was thrilled to get back to my Linux roots, used Debian back when kernel was 1.3x. So here I was, mediacenter and a real Linux distro, not this ājust enoughā. My lack of kodi experience made me unsure how to manage files, yeah true i could add sources in the file manager and so onā¦ but that Iāve learned later.
My thought was why isnāt there an easy (at least for us āold guysā that have worked with NortonCommander) file manager in shell. Why not have MC(midnight commander) installed by default on the system so all users can have a file manager in shell.
I was perplexed when I got the ānoā answer on a feature request, I mean who doesnāt need a file manager? But after realizing the design idea of OSMC, I got it. First of all at that time, SD cards were smaller/more expansive, that I could somewhat accept, but what made me really accept the āNoā, was this question: āWill it improve the mediacenter?ā Not the handling of the whole OS, but the actual Mediacenter. Since this is a OSMC, itās all about the mediacenter and leaves the rest up to you. I mean how hard is it to install MC (in my case, sudo apt-get install mc). Or in your case, click Settings->MyOSMC->Store->Cron->Install->apply or use apt-get you too.
MyOSMC have moved location since I started using OSMC, and there is almost no new apps in store, but as Iāve understood it, that should be changing when MyOSMC2 makes an entrance.
Thatās where it should go.
No, it should go wherever on my network it makes sense to have it.
āWill it improve the mediacenter?ā
Will the ability to run scheduled tasks on the mediacenter improve it?
No, it doesnāt since the way it is built. It works optimalt (close to anyway) as it is. There are cases where a huge library, almost fills the whole ram, and it has to start swapping or other cpu costly solutions to not OoM-error. Then think how sad a user would be to have another process auto starting, eating some more memory. That does nothing to the actual medicenter solution?
Not for the vast majority of users. I find autofs, nfs-server, vim, alsa-utils indispensable on my OSMC devices but none are included by default which is fine by me. But Iād far rather have a minimal install that I can customise than the kitchen sink approach of the desktop distros, so where do you draw the line?
Yes, I use cron for backups but only on my daily driver that runs tvheadend and acts as a fileserver for other devices. And there are other ways than cron to achieve running a timed script which some users may prefer. As @fzinken says, cron is simple to install if you want it. Why Itās in the āAppStoreā Iāve no idea since anyone using it is going to be a cli jockey anyway.
So the answer to your question should probably be 'only for users that know how to set up a cron job who will therefore have no problem running apt-get install cron.
When I originally suggested to include cron, I did that, because as part of the standard OSMC installation some crontabs have been provided, but no cron demon. Thus it took me some time to discover that - I wondered why my additional cron entries never fired.
Anyhow, Iām happy with the given solution (to go with OSMC appstore).
Regards, Michael
For future installations from the next update, Iāll be including cron by default.
It will still be manageable via My OSMC ā Services and My OSMC ā App Store however.