*BSD News Article 46284


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From: zander@grendel.t.sheridanc.on.ca (Mark Zander)
Subject: Re: Cron problems
Message-ID: <DAzyv9.2GD@eclipse.sheridanc.on.ca>
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Organization: Sheridan College
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Date: Fri, 30 Jun 1995 17:49:56 GMT
Lines: 49

John Banghart (john@success.net) wrote:
: I am trying to execute 2 scripts via cron.  One every day at 1 am, and the
: other every Sunday at 1am.

: Here's how it looks when I do a 'crontab -l'.

: # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
: # (/tmp/crontab.13603 installed on Tue Jun 27 11:56:29 1995)
: # (Cron version -- =Id: crontab.c,v 2.14 1994/01/26 02:25:50 vixie Exp =)
: 0 1 * * *       /usr/local/etc/httpd/logs/dailystats
: 0 1 * * 7       /usr/local/etc/httpd/logs/weeklystats

: However, they don't appear to be running and I'm not seeing any error messages
: in the email reports I get from the system.

: The scripts are just sh scripts, with various unix commands and calls to a
: couple of Perl scripts.

: What am I missing?

: I can see that it says 'DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE', but I entered these using
: 'crontab -e' which I thought was correct.

: -John

<soap box>
 Its always a good idea to avoid using crontab's interactive editor. 
 Just fire up your favorite UN*X editor and create a file which contains all
the information which you want in the crontab entry. Then you just have to
give the command 'contab -u <username> <filename>' to install it. 
 One reason is you never have the option of keeping a backup if you change
things. 
</soap box>
 Make sure that you are running the final scripts with verbose information.
If you are using 'sh' you would put something like '#!/bin/sh -v' on the first
line. I'm not sure what perl would need.
 Back a while we had to include a 'MAILTO' variable to set who we wanted the
output mailed to. 

Hope this helps
later.
----------------------------------------------------
Mark Zander         mark.zander@sheridanc.on.ca
Technical Support
Sheridan College    (905) 845-9430 ext. 2166
1430 Trafalger Rd   (905) 815-4011 fax.
Oakville, Ont.
L6H 2L1                                           8-) 
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