I once used make to jury-rig a fairly complex set of backup jobs for a customer on a very short notice. Jobs were grouped and each group was allowed to run a certain number of jobs in parallel, and some jobs had a non-overlap constraint. The problem was well beyond regular time-based scheduling, so I made a script to generate recursive makefiles for each group that started backups via a command-line utility, and a master makefile to invoke them with group-specific parallelism via -j.
File outputs were progress logs of the backups that got renamed after the backup, so if any jobs failed in the backup window, you could easily inspect them and rerun the failed jobs just by rerunning the make command.
Fun times. Handling filenames with spaces was an absolute pain, though.
File outputs were progress logs of the backups that got renamed after the backup, so if any jobs failed in the backup window, you could easily inspect them and rerun the failed jobs just by rerunning the make command.
Fun times. Handling filenames with spaces was an absolute pain, though.