Re: How to start and verify cron?

[Brian Inglis <Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca>]

On 2019-07-10 16:15, David Karr wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 10:20 AM Brian Inglis wrote:
>     On 2019-07-10 10:55, David Karr wrote:
>     > I've checked the user guide and the FAQ, and I can't find any information
>     > about how to start cron and verify that it's working.  I found other blog
>     > posts on other sites, but some of them are old.
> 
>     Did you run service setup script /bin/cron-config to set up the service?
> When I ran that now, it says "Cron is already installed as a service under
> account ...", so I assume that means that I did.
>     > I had installed cron, and I thought it was working, but now I think that it
>     > is not.  If I edit "~/crontab" and then run "crontab -l", it lists the
>     > changes I've made to jobs, so at least that is working.  The real job I
>     > have didn't appear to be doing what it was supposed to be doing, so I added
>     > a new trivial job that just appends output from "date" to a file in my
>     > homedir, and after the scheduled time of the job, the file was not created.
> 
>     Messages from cron and other active services should be visible in the Windows
>     application event log if you have not set up a syslog service.
> I went through it, but I didn't see any indications of issues with cron.  I'm
> not sure what to look for, or where in the event log interface.
>     > This is the additional job I added:
>     >
>     >     40,42,44 * * * * date >> /home/<myuid>/date.txt
>     >
>     > I did find a "/var/log/cron.log", but it is empty, and the modtime is from
>     > a few months ago.
>     >
>     > One blog post I found talks about running "cygrunsrv -I cron -p
>     > /usr/sbin/cron -a -D". I just did this, and it reports "The specified
>     > service already exists."
>     >
>     > This is my uname -a output:
>     >
>     >     CYGWIN_NT-6.1 ... 3.0.3(0.338/5/3) 2019-03-09 19:12 x86_64 Cygwi
>     For a more Unix like and self contained Cygwin approach, install syslog-ng, run
>     service setup scripts /bin/cygserver-config /bin/syslog-ng-config
>     /bin/cron-config, add service dependencies to start up in that order, and you
>     should see cron messages in /var/log/syslog if you run elevated: you can also
>     run chmod elevated to make /var/log/syslog world readable, or setfacl to add
>     user or group read ACLs.
> How do I add service dependencies to start up in a particular order?

In an elevated cmd or bash shell:
elevated > OR # sc config syslog-ng depend= cygserver
elevated > OR # sc config cron depend= syslog-ng/cygserver
N.B. the "=" is part of each keyword; multiple service dependencies are
separated by "/".

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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