I should preface this by stating I am a novice in general when it comes to the linux world.

I’m trying to write a bash script that will run on an ordinary basis as a cron job. It’s simple enough it just runs apt update -y apt upgrade -y apt autoclean every 24 hours. The issue is that I also would like to be able to schedule a restart automatically if a restart would be frugal. I don’t really want to just rely on checking for /var/run/reboot-required, and the output from debian-goodies checkrestart seems to be pretty dated and incompatible with scripts in general. Would it be better to run systemctl status and check for degradation, and then schedule a restart based on that? Does anyone far smarter than me have a solution?

  • On an average Debian server reboot-required is really only ever triggered by kernel upgrades and those happen more often than you want but also not very often.

    Cries in Arch