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RE: cron does not do anything


Right on, Pierre! Thanks a lot for the clue. Finally I figured it out. There were two problems.

The first problem, yes, I was a bit impatient and should've waited one more minute. It seems crontab change does take more than one minute to be effective. Once I changed it to "* * * * *", I saw an error message in /var/log/messages saying "(CRON) error (can't cd to HOME)", which is the second problem. For the record, my cygwin auto-generated /etc/passwd shows my home dir to be "/cygdrive/h", which is an NT mounted share - not sure why is it set to that and why cron couldn't cd to it. Anyway, I changed it to "/home/tzhou" and viola, the cron is working.

Again, huge thanks for the help.

Ting

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pierre A. Humblet [mailto:Pierre.Humblet@ieee.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:59 PM
> To: Ting Zhou
> Cc: cygwin@cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: cron does not do anything
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ting Zhou" <>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:33 PM
> 
> 
> Thanks for the quick response. The crontab line is literally like:
> 
> 28 19 * * * /usr/bin/touch /tmp/abcd
> 
> Pierre, attached is the fgrep result of all the logs in /var/log.
> "cron.log" was created but is
> empty all along.
> 
> Let me know if I can supply further diagnostic information.
> 
> ******************
> Right, cron does nothing. But ...
> The job is supposed to run at 19:28 every day
> You started cron at 19:26:30, it's not clear if the crontab existed then.
> You edited the crontab at 19:27:19
> When 19:28 came, cron reloaded the crontab but did not run anything.
> I don't know if it's by design or not, you are playing it close.
> Have you tried using * * * * * in the crontab while you are debugging this?
> 
> Also try running a command like "env" that produces an output.
> It should appear in ~/cron.log or in /tmp/cronXXXX if there is a problem.
> 
> Finally your group is mkgroup-l-d. This suggests that /etc/group
> may not be up to date.
> 
> Pierre


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