Broken crontab/anacron

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 08:19 -0500, Robert Locke wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 06:27 -0500, James Pifer wrote:
> > > A very quick test of cron.  Put this line in /etc/crontab
> > > 
> > > * * * * * root touch /root/crontest ; echo "crontest updated"
> > > 
> > > Then look at the file to see the date//time stamp
> > > ls -l /root/crontest
> > > 
> > > If cron is doing it's job the time stamp should get updated once per
> > > minute so it should stay current on date/time forever (until you remove
> > > the entry from /etc/crontab)  You also should get an email to root once
> > > a minute with the echoed message.
> > > 
> > > Note, you will want to remove that line from crontab very soon.
> > > 
> > 
> > Jeff,
> > 
> > I get nothing. No /root/crontest file created and no messages in root's
> > mailbox. 
> > 
> > My crontab now looks like:
> > [root at mythtv ~]# cat /etc/crontab
> > SHELL=/bin/bash
> > PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
> > MAILTO=root
> > HOME=/
> > 
> > # run-parts
> > 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
> > 02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
> > 22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
> > 42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly
> > * * * * * root touch /root/crontest ; echo "crontest updated"
> > 
> > Should I reinstall cron?
> 
> Pardon for jumping in here, but have you restarted crond since you made
> the change to /etc/crontab?  I am not sure if crond is going to
> automagically notice a change to the file or not....  So, to restart the
> cron daemon, you could do either a "service crond restart" or a "service
> crond reload".
> 
> HTH,
> 
Cron is one of the few daemons that does not require restart when the
config file (crontab) is changed.

> --Rob
>