> One of those people liked to write 600 line cron jobs to do critical business functions.

I was a long-time maintainer of Debian's cron, a fork of Vixie cron (all cron implementations I'm aware of are forks of Vixie cron, or its successor, ISC cron).

There are a ton of reasons why I wouldn't do this, the primary one being is that cron really just executes jobs, period. It doesn't serialize them, it doesn't check for load, logging is really rudimentary, etc.

A few years ago somebody noticed that the cron daemon could be DoS'ed by a user submitting a huge crontab. I implemented a 1000-line limit to crontabs thinking "nobody would ever have 1000-line crontabs". I was wrong, quickly received bug reports.

I then increased it to 10K lines, but as far as I recall, users were hitting even that limit. Crazy.

Is Dillon cron a fork of Vixie cron?

Hadn't heard of it before, and it appears not to be.

There indeed exist a few non-Vixie-cron-derivative implementations but as far as I'm aware, all major Linux and BSD distributions use a Vixie cron derivative.

Edit: I see now where I caused confusion. In my original post, I should have said all default cron implementations.

I thought Dillon cron was the default cron in Slackware? Hard to be a more major Linux distribution than Slackware, in terms of historical impact if not current popularity.

Could be. Slackware is a popular name, but I would call it "niche" rather than a major distribution. Just my personal view, obviously.

I just confirmed with a Slackware user today, it still does use Dillon cron. I had a vague memory from before I switched from Slackware to Debian late last millennium.

It always gives me a spell of cognitive dissonance when someone points out that Slackware is no longer a "major" distribution.

It used to be the major distribution. Funny how times change.