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From: Ting Zhou <tzhou AT guardiananalytics DOT com>
To: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org>
CC: "cygwin AT cygwin DOT com" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:20:23 -0700
Subject: RE: cron does not do anything
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Right on, Pierre! Thanks a lot for the clue. Finally I figured it out. Ther=
e were two problems.

The first problem, yes, I was a bit impatient and should've waited one more=
 minute. It seems crontab change does take more than one minute to be effec=
tive. Once I changed it to "* * * * *", I saw an error message in /var/log/=
messages saying "(CRON) error (can't cd to HOME)", which is the second prob=
lem. For the record, my cygwin auto-generated /etc/passwd shows my home dir=
 to be "/cygdrive/h", which is an NT mounted share - not sure why is it set=
 to that and why cron couldn't cd to it. Anyway, I changed it to "/home/tzh=
ou" and viola, the cron is working.

Again, huge thanks for the help.

Ting

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pierre A. Humblet [mailto:Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:59 PM
> To: Ting Zhou
> Cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
> Subject: Re: cron does not do anything
>=20
>=20
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ting Zhou" <>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:33 PM
>=20
>=20
> Thanks for the quick response. The crontab line is literally like:
>=20
> 28 19 * * * /usr/bin/touch /tmp/abcd
>=20
> Pierre, attached is the fgrep result of all the logs in /var/log.
> "cron.log" was created but is
> empty all along.
>=20
> Let me know if I can supply further diagnostic information.
>=20
> ******************
> Right, cron does nothing. But ...
> The job is supposed to run at 19:28 every day
> You started cron at 19:26:30, it's not clear if the crontab existed then.
> You edited the crontab at 19:27:19
> When 19:28 came, cron reloaded the crontab but did not run anything.
> I don't know if it's by design or not, you are playing it close.
> Have you tried using * * * * * in the crontab while you are debugging thi=
s?
>=20
> Also try running a command like "env" that produces an output.
> It should appear in ~/cron.log or in /tmp/cronXXXX if there is a problem.
>=20
> Finally your group is mkgroup-l-d. This suggests that /etc/group
> may not be up to date.
>=20
> Pierre


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