Tools update on miles
Some of the tools we currently have installed on miles change frequently enough that we needed to create a script to automatically update them (for now, once a week). This will ensure that the cluster users run the latest available versions, but will remove the need for manual downloads/updates.
The tools that are currently automatically updated - UCLATools and AFNI, are both available for download so it was relatively easy to script updates using 'wget'. 'wget' is available on miles as a part of fink distributed tools (/sw/bin/wget). The script that handles the updates can be found at /Volumes/local/Updates/Tools_wget.sh and the crontab file with scheduling command is /Volumes/local/Updates/crontab.tools_update.
This script is running as a user (me) cron job. The difference between scheduling task using system cron (executed by root) and user cron, is that users' crontab files cannot be edited directly. When editing system crontab file, simply open /etc/crontab file in an editor (as root). However, if tasks need to be added to users' cron, create a separate file (in this case crontab.tools_update), schedule tasks, and then execute 'crontab crontab.tools_update' command to add the commands to the users' crontab file. To make sure that they have been added, type 'crontab -l' and the crontab file will be listed. To find out more about scheduling tasks on os x see Scheduling Tasks in Panther.