MEPIS Community Forum

kde-config-cron

It shows as Task scheduler in System Settings.

I used the task scheduler to add the two cron jobs you referenced to run at bootup. You can also set it to run daily at any particular time, or on any particular day of the week, month or year. It is quite a useful application.

Actually, I did this prior to experimenting with /dev/null. I used the System Settings > Task Manager to schedule the job. The shell script ran properly when I executed it manually, but when I set it up as a chon job, it failed to clear out ~/.thumbnails/normal.

I don't know about M8.5/KDE 4.3, but with the KDE 4.7.4 Task Scheduler I found I didn't need the script I posted earlier. I just pasted in the command I wanted to have run and created the schedule for it. I changed the command to rm ~/.thumbnails/*/*. The cron job seems to be working okay for me in removing the files in both the ~/.thumbnails/large & ~/.thumbnails/normal directories.

Thanks. I'll try your variation of using the wild card in the rm command in place of listing the directory names. It seems that including two different tasks in one shell script running as a cron job doesn't work for some reason.

Hmm, I don't know why that would be. I use cron jobs often to run fairly complicated scripts containing multiple commands.

I don't know either, but when my original shell script ran as a cron job, it would clear ~/.thumbnails/large (1st task) but it failed to clear ~/.thumbnails/normal (2nd task). Strangely enough, when I ran the shell script manually, it would complete both tasks without a problem.

UPDATE:

I followed kmathern's suggestion of using the task scheduler to run a command directly every 15 minutes:



This does clear both sub-directories every 15 minutes. BTW, I think adding the option "-fr" (force, recursive) helps.

So I don't have to mess around with /dev/null after all. I'm marking this thread "Solved" even though I ended up using a different method entirely.

Cool. Although it's not as dead-easy as kmathern's solution, another more complicated option would have been to use a ramdisk, assuming you reboot periodically and can spare ~100MB of RAM. I just set one up, linked to .thumbnails, and it works nicely.

What kind of increase in speed did you see? With the RAM disk that is.

Surprisingly, not that much, but I didn't really explore it that much before I quit fooling with it. In a split Dolphin I opened some folders of photos and then watched as it (and the .thumbnails folder)) became populated with thumbnails. I didn't notice any difference really.