RE: cron won't execute tasks

["Dave Korn" <dk at artimi dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-owner On Behalf Of Igor Pechtchanski
> Sent: 29 October 2004 01:47

> On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Robert Pollard wrote:

> > Cron will not execute every minute now.  I have a scheduled 
> task that does
> > something like "* * * * * /bin/echo "Test" >/dev/null 
> 1>/TestAct.log"  It
> > doesn't execute at all.
> 
> Exactly how do you know that it doesn't execute?  I hope not 
> by the lack
> of output in /TestAct.log, because the above command will 
> *never* write
> anything to /TestAct.log...  It should change the mod time on 
> it, though.
> :-)

  Heh, that was my first thought when I saw "echo >/dev/null", but
redirections are applied in the order they appear on the command line, and
so stdout gets redirected first to /dev/null, then the 1> redirects it again
to the file.  Try it, it really works:

dk@mace ~/test> ls -lart
total 0
drwxrwxrwx+  13 dk       Domain U        0 Oct 29 10:43 ..
drwxr-xr-x+   2 dk       Domain U        0 Oct 29 10:43 .
dk@mace ~/test> /bin/echo "Test" >/dev/null 1>TestAct.log
dk@mace ~/test> ls -lart
total 1
drwxrwxrwx+  13 dk       Domain U        0 Oct 29 10:43 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 dk       Domain U        5 Oct 29 10:43 TestAct.log
drwxr-xr-x+   2 dk       Domain U        0 Oct 29 10:43 .
dk@mace ~/test> cat TestAct.log
Test
dk@mace ~/test>

> > Although, it wouldn't execute the scripts because it couldn't switch
> > user context.
> 
> mkpasswd -d -u DomainUserName >> /etc/passwd
> 
> You may also need to do something for groups, e.g.,
> 
> mkgroup -d >> /etc/group


  You forgot to mention cron-diagnose.sh!  I think 1.7 is the most recent.

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2004-07/msg00207.html

    cheers, 
      DaveK
-- 
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....


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