Sample

Sample is an excellent task scheduling tool that fills the void in the POSIX-compliant cron-family. This project specializes in monitoring files on a user-to-user basis by waiting for their timestamp or filesize to hit a particular threshold, then executing a specified command to handle the files.

Some key features of Sample are that it is POSIX-compliant and portable on unix-based systems. The syntax is simple and easy to understand, making it quick to learn. This tool is versatile and capable of use in many situations. Sample is fast, running quickly and restricted if necessary. Its small size leaves a small footprint in memory and execution, and it can also grow without changing the core syntax. Sample is secure as much as possible when running arbitrary commands.

Sample can only "sample" matched files if the active user has _write_access to the file and it does not contain non-printable characters. Otherwise, it will not process the matched file at any level. Additionally, Sample only processes unique users with unique home directories, prioritizing those in the /etc/passwd file on a first-come, first-serve basis.

To install Sample, follow the typical installation steps, including running the configure, make, and make install commands. For OSX systems, /usr/bin/sample already exists, so a different set of commands must be used to rename sample/samples/sampled to fsample/fsamples/fsampled.

Once installed, the daemon needs to be started and placed in your rc script(s) for your convenience. Users can edit their ~/.sample file with validation, and to test if the Sample daemon is running correctly, run specific commands for it with a set of parameters.

The latest update of Sample includes a new support for configure's --prefix argument. If supplied, it will place all sample-related files inside that prefix directory, or it will place them in an assumed "best" standard place if not supplied. The update also includes a new addition of "%i" inode string replacement variable for commands.