[PLUG] cron problem

alan alan at clueserver.org
Thu Oct 25 20:54:59 UTC 2007


On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, Richard C. Steffens wrote:

> Among the several things that stopped working after I ran the upgrade
> for SuSE 10.1 last week is the automation of some lights in the house. I
> have the following crontab:
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> rsteff at Moonguide:~> crontab -l
> # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
> # (/tmp/crontab.XXXXlOXVmQ installed on Thu Oct 25 13:31:37 2007)
> # (Cron version V5.0 -- $Id: crontab.c,v 1.12 2004/01/23 18:56:42 vixie
> Exp $)
> #
> # turn on lights
> #
> 30 17 * * * /home/rsteff/ShellScripts/x10-lights-on.sh
>
> #
> # turn off lights
> #
> 59 23 * * * /home/rsteff/ShellScripts/x10-lights-off.sh
>
> #
> # testing
> #
> 1,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * *
> /home/rsteff/ShellScripts/x10-lights-on.sh
> 3,7,12,17,22,27,32,37,42,47,52,57 * * * *
> /home/rsteff/ShellScripts/x10-lights-off.sh
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> (Normally, I have the bottom four lines commented out.)
>
> I can run the shell scripts directly from the command line and they work
> as expected. They don't run automatically. That caused me to wonder if
> there might be a problem with cron, itself. So, next I tried to find out
> if cron is running. Since I don't do this very often, I typed it wrong
> the first time. However, that did cause me to wonder if somehow
> something is configured incorrectly.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> rsteff at Moonguide:~> ps ax | cron
> bash: cron: command not found
>
> rsteff at Moonguide:~> ps ax | grep cron
>  658 pts/1    S+     0:00 grep cron
> 3123 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
> rsteff at Moonguide:~>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Recommendations?

Are you running these as part of the system crontab or as a specific user?

If you used 'vi' or something similar:

/etc/init.d/crond restart

If you are running as a regular user, use

crontab -e

to edit the file and it will add it to cron without having to restart.

-- 
Q: Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.



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