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Date: Tue, 23 May 2023 20:32:26 -0400
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Subject: Re: cron: trying and totally failing to run a simple cron job - fixed
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From: Jonathan Clark via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Reply-To: Jonathan Clark <jonathan@att.net>
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I got this running. In the hope that it may help others, I give some details here.

It turned out that I was on the right track - it *was* the space in my Windows username which was making cron complain. The simple addition of a (basically completely fake but plausible) MAILTO line in the crontab got past the UNSAFE and the cron job started working, more or less. Brian also mentioned that he used a MAILTO, which was helpful. Thanks!

That was not quite the end of the story. With the cron job working, I went looking for the output.
I couldn't use a real email address in the MAILTO because I don't know how to persuade sendmail to use the SMTP SUBMIT protocol (anyone?), but it took me some time to find the cron.log file, which was hiding in "/cygdrive/c/cygwin64/home/Jonathan Clark". I didn't even know that directory existed, so this was all terribly exciting. Setting HOME in the crontab to my "real" HOME (or at least somewhere I could remember to look) solved that problem.

While poking around Vixie's source code I ran across this bug fix:
https://github.com/vixie/cron/commit/690fc534c7316e2cf6ff16b8e83ba7734b5186d2
which I am fairly sure explains my observation of the delay in picking up a changed crontab.

Anyway, thanks for the help! And thanks again to everyone for the work on cygwin.

Jonathan


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