How to start and verify cron?

[Brian Inglis]

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?

> 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.

> 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.

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

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