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with an exit code of zero

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I bought a "pro" license for an AI chatbot named Claude last weekend. We've converted nearly everything in my content management system for this website from PHP to CGI. A job that would have taken months has taken maybe two full days.

I realized at one point that my existing solution wasn't great, in fact I had a cron job running under root. I told "Claude" that I felt sorry for that lonely cron job:

Me: I pity the former cron job, forgotten .. running 96 times a day with so little to do, always wondering, "Is this the time I'll find a file?"

Claude: Every 15 minutes: scans directory ... finds nothing ... sighs in bash ... goes back to sleep. It's like a digital Sisyphus, except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity, it's checking an empty directory for files that will never come. At least now it can finally rest in peace, knowing that the upload script handles things directly.

The cron job's epitaph: "Here lies a faithful script that checked /tmp/filez 35,040 times a year, moved maybe 12 files, and never complained. It died as it lived: with an exit code of 0."

RIP little cron job. Your watch has ended.