The singularity of cron jobs
       Wednesday Jan 17  9:50:27 2018
       
       I have been running two cron jobs on sdf-eu since 2011, one runs 
       monthly and the other one runs once a year. Both are local scripts on 
       my $HOME/bin that I wrote for the maintenance of my gopherhole/phlog. 
       They both run flawlessly.
       
       However I have usually run into trouble when running cron jobs on my 
       debian machines with local scripts. Just to make it clear, cron works 
       fine, but it fails to run local scripts and I still do not know why. 
       
       What I do as a workaround, is dropping the scripts on cron.hourly or 
       cron.daily or whatever and be done with it since this method works 
       like a charm. On occasion I had to edit /etc/crontab to modify the 
       time the scripts are run at.
       
       But often, when I need to run anything at a very specific time I 
       simply use "at". "at" is a very nice and easy to use utility. Really 
       really handy but the problem is that you always have to specify the 
       time and the commands to be run. That is why using cron is way better 
       for repeated events.
       
       By the way, so that you know, the cron job that I run once a year is 
       archiving my phlog:
       
       55 23 31 12 * /arpa/c/chals/bin/pharc
       
       Oh yeah and it has worked flawlessly since 2011! That is: I am 
       phlogging since 2011!!!