Welcome to SSH-CRON.

I wrote ssh-cron after a discussion with Jean-Paul van Oosten about the
dangers of using ssh keys without passphrases. But when using ssh keys with
passphrases your cron jobs performing tasks at remote computers, suddenly
can't be used anymore, since cron cannot provide the passphrases.

It's also not possible to simply start ssh-agent and then crontab as a child
process, as crontab loses access to ssh-agent's passphrases.

Ssh-cron was subsequently designed to allow jobs requiring access to
ssh-keys to be run regularly. In other words, ssh-cron combines crontab
facilities with the use of ssh keys protected by passphrases.

More information about ssh-cron and how to use its options and crontab-like
specification file is found in ssh-cron's man-page.

To compile ssh-cron from scratch you need a fairly recent Gnu g++ compiler
(e.g. version 15.0.1 or more recent) and you need the Bobcat library (available
at Gitlab and also as, e.g. Debian package). Compilation involves
compiling all .cc files in this and all subdirectories, and then linking these
components together. However, program construction is simplified if you also
install icmake (also available at Sourceforge and as Debian package). If you
have icmake available, check the defines in INSTALL.im for appropriateness for
your system. Adapt them if necessary and simply run './build program' from
this directory.


Frank B. Brokken
(f.b.brokken@rug.nl)


