Broken crontab/anacron

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:02 -0500, James Pifer wrote:
> > what do you get if you run " # ps aux | grep cron " ?
> > Mine gives 
> > [jeff at goliath ~]$ ps aux | grep cron
> > root      4266  0.0  0.1  4444  812 ?        Ss   00:58   0:00 crond
> > 
> > That indicates crond is running as the service
> 
> Looks like it's running. 
> 
> [root at mythtv ~]# ps aux | grep cron
> root     20854  0.0  0.0  5116  696 ?        Ss   07:40   0:00 crond
> 
> 
> > You have removed the lines for your mythtv installation.
> > They can be put back if the files are in /root as the paths indicate.
> > 
> 
> I removed them in case they were somehow causing the problem. The paths
> were correct, the files were in /root. 
> 

> Yet they won't run when they're in there. Is there any way to see any
> debug or realtime feedback from cron?
> 
Are these files the only cron jobs that are not working?
Are they executable?
Do they have the proper shebang line as the first line of the script?
 
Is cron the problem, or is your mythtv stuff not running the real
problem.



A very quick test of cron.  Put this line in /etc/crontab

* * * * * root touch /root/crontest ; echo "crontest updated"

Then look at the file to see the date//time stamp
ls -l /root/crontest

If cron is doing it's job the time stamp should get updated once per
minute so it should stay current on date/time forever (until you remove
the entry from /etc/crontab)  You also should get an email to root once
a minute with the echoed message.

Note, you will want to remove that line from crontab very soon.

> James
>