Welcome to SSH-CRON. Ssh-cron is now in its beta stage. I wrote ssh-cron after a discussion with Jean-Paul van Oosten about the dangers of using ssh keys without passphrases. But when using ssh keys with passphrases your cron jobs performing tasks at remote computers, suddenly can't be used anymore, since cron cannot provide the passphrases. It's also not possible to simply start ssh-agent and then crontab as a child process, as crontab loses access to ssh-agent's passphrases. Ssh-cron was subsequently designed to allow jobs requiring access to ssh-keys to be run regularly. In other words, ssh-cron combines crontab facilities with the use of ssh keys protected by passphrases. More information about ssh-cron and how to use its options and crontab-like specification file is found in ssh-cron's man-page. To compile ssh-cron from scratch you need a fairly recent Gnu g++ compiler (e.g. version 4.9.1 or more recent) and you need the Bobcat library (available at SourceForge and also as, e.g. Debian package). Compilation involves compiling all .cc files in this and all subdirectories, and then linking these components together. However, program construction is simplified if you also install icmake (also available at Sourceforge and as Debian package). If you have icmake available, check the defines in INSTALL.im for appropriateness for your system. Adapt them if necessary and simply run './build program' from this directory. Frank B. Brokken (f.b.brokken@rug.nl)