I don't think that's a very fair assesment. It is true that some crons (I can only speak of my own and Vixie cron for certain) make use of such functionality, but so could many other long running daemons. Almost anything which implements some sort of caching, e.g. a finger daemon that caches .plan s.

Specifically where none of the caching modules on CPAN are appropriate. They are centered around IPC. This is useful for caching where the filesystem is authoritative and significant processing must be done on every file.

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perl -pe "s/\b;([mnst])/'\1/mg"