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Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:19:03 -0500
From: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org>
Subject: Re: Cron event logs says (*system*) NOT REGULAR... what does this  mean
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Korn" <>
To: <cygwin>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 3:43 PM
Subject: RE: Cron event logs says (*system*) NOT REGULAR... what does this mean


| On 08 November 2007 20:28, Jerome Fong wrote:
| 
| > Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
| >>> On 08 November 2007 19:29, Jerome Fong wrote:
| >>> 
| >>>> I got cron working as a daemon, but now it stopped working again.  I'm
| >>>> getting the following errors in the cronevents output.  Anyone know what
| >>>> this means? 2007/11/08 11:02:18 [SYSTEM] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 1644:
| >>>> (*system*) NOT REGULAR (/etc/cron.d/cron.daily)
| >> 
| >> It means that file is not a regular file.
| >> 
| >> Pierre
| >> 
| >> 
| > I (jfong) owned the file.  Should (*system*) own the file?  Sorry, I
| > don't understand what it means when you say it is not a regular file?
| > What makes it Not Regular?
| 
|  Is it a symlink?
| 
.. or a directory
database.c-     if (!S_ISREG(statbuf->st_mode)) {
database.c:             log_it(fname, getpid(), "NOT REGULAR", tabname);

My advice is to forget about /etc/cron.d , at least until you get the basic stuff to work.
The files in that directory have the same format as the /etc/crontab file
and it's almost equivalent to append their contents to /etc/crontab,
(except for file specific environment variables)

The ownership rules are (in the README)

security
********
- The crontab files as well as /etc/crontab must be readable by the cron
  daemon. crontab.exe insures that by setting their group to Administrators
  (more precisely, the first in /etc/group with SID S-1-5-32-544).
- crontab.exe can be run by anyone, the cron.allow and cron.deny files
  are not used. The only way to limit the use of cron is to control
  write/modify access to /var/cron/tabs, /etc/cron.d and /etc/crontab.
- In addition the cron daemon enforces the following rules when the
  files are on a NTFS file system and CYGWIN=ntsec (or "smbntsec").
  - All crontab files as well as /etc/crontab must be writable only
    by their owner.
  - The /etc/crontab file and the files in /etc/cron.d must be owned by
    SYSTEM (more precisely the first user in /etc/passwd with SID S-1-5-18).
  - The crontab files must be owned by their respective crontab user
    or by SYSTEM.
- If you run a crontab command as SYSTEM, make sure either SYSTEM has a
  home directory in /etc/passwd or HOME is specified in the crontab.




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