From the "they didn't have that in BSD 4.2 so I didn't know about it" department, a handy feature in Vixie cron: the @reboot option. It means run once at restart, an alternative to /etc/init.d for ordinary users. Vixie cron has other useful features:
@reboot        Run once, at startup.
@yearly        Run once a year, "0 0 1 1 *".
@monthly       Run once a month, "0 0 1 * *".
@weekly        Run once a week, "0 0 * * 0".
@daily         Run once a day, "0 0 * * *".
@hourly        Run once an hour, "0 * * * *".
This has been available since 1994 but it doesn't show up in RedHat man pages. It does show up in Debian.
tech
  2003-09-05 00:46 Z