Question

The idea is to have a central controller, that can manage cron, for many hosts. I have looked at Schedule::Cron and Config::Crontab

But none of them provide the remote capability. There is one that looks promising, IPC::PerlSSH, but not sure if i understand how to run Config::Crontab using IPC::PerlSSH

If anyone has some experience in this area please let me know. Perl does claim to be good for Linux admin tasks and this seems like one of the top tasks to be scripted. But doing it JUST on the local machine, after ssh’ng into it does not sound like fun.

Answer 1

# untested!
use Net::OpenSSH;
use Config::Crontab;

my $ssh = Net::OpenSSH->new($host, ...);
$ssh->system({stdout_file => 'crontab.out'}, 'crontab -l');
my $cc = Config::Crontab->new;
$cc->read('crontab.out');

# manipulate $cc crontab here:
# ...

$cc->write('crontab.out.1');
$ssh->system({stdin_file => 'crontab.out.1'}, 'crontab -');