PowerHouse with UNIX

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Hello everyone,

Here is my own experience.

When I first moved a Powerhouse application from a proprietary o/s (DG
AOSVS-II) to UNIX (DGUX) I discovered that the at/batch/cron commands were
inadequate.
Two important problems:
If you schedule a job for a time that has passed (e.g. one second ago) it
never gets executed.
If you want to queue two jobs so that job2 waits for job1 to finish and then
starts you cannot do that.
It has been some time now but I remember there was no flexibility in
defining additional queues or reducing the number of streams in the existing
queues.

A quick search for third party s/w did not produce any results. Also I did
not have any budget for this. So what I did was I spent some time to write
my own batch job processor which simulated most features of the DG system.
It took me about 3 weeks (I used C). There were a few shortcomings and it is
not a finished product but it has been running for about 7 years.

I have changed jobs since. Where I work now we use the batch command (AIX,
HPUX), with all the disadvantages that come with it.

I found out since that on an NT server things are even worse.

In my opinion this is one of the very few disadvantages of Unix.

Regards,
Andreas Argyriou
Scicom S.A.
Athens, Greece