How to start and verify cron?

David Karr davidmichaelkarr@gmail.com
Thu Jul 11 21:20:00 GMT 2019


On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:56 PM David Karr <davidmichaelkarr@gmail.com>
wrote:

> It's curious that when I bring up the default "Packages" view, filtering
> for "syslog-ng" doesn't find anything.  I had to switch to the Categories
> view, and then filtering for that found it.
>
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 4:04 PM Brian Inglis <
> Brian.Inglis@systematicsw.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> 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 "/".
>>
>
After doing all of this, I still can't get cron jobs to work, and I can't
get any info on why.

This is the current output from "crontab -l":

----------------
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (crontab installed on Thu Jul 11 14:13:09 2019)
# (Cron version V5.0 -- $Id: crontab.c,v 1.12 2004/01/23 18:56:42 vixie Exp
$)
0       0,12    *       *       *       find /tmp/.logcache/ -type f -mtime
+6 -exec rm {} \;
14,15,16,17     *       *       *       *        date >>
/home/dk068x/date.txt
----------------

I've tried editing that last one and changing the minutes to include
upcoming minutes, and then after those minutes, I check the results, and
there are none.  Nothing in cron.log or syslog-ng.log.

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