[INFO]: If cron (vixie-cron) seems to do nothing (doesn't work) ...

Keith G. Robertson-Turner fedora-gmane.00002 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk
Mon Jun 19 01:39:13 UTC 2006


There are at least two methods of using cron (not including anacron and
"at"). One is the "crontab" command itself, which creates user crontab
files in /var/spool/cron, the other (not in all distros) is to create a
standard crontab entry for a task in /etc/cron.d/.

I just diagnosed a user's cron problems, and discovered that a task he
scheduled would not run because the whole crontab argument was being
interpreted as a comment:

*/10 * * * *	joe /usr/bin/foobar # >/dev/null

Thinking he could simply *comment* out the file redirection, and the
output would be sent to syslog. However, (and this had not occurred to
him - or me for that matter), it looks like cron interprets a hash
(pound) symbol at *any position in the crontab argument* as an
indication that the *whole argument* is a comment.

Personally, I think this is broken behaviour, and maybe unique to the
particular release, but anyway, it's a heads-up for anyone having
similar problems ... *remove your comments* from crontab {place them on
a separate line).

vixie-cron-4.1-54.FC5

-
K.




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