roy@phri.UUCP (04/03/87)
Can somebody explain to me why I can't get expire to run
automatically from crontab? We're running 2.10.2 (I know, I know, we'll
get 2.11 up eventually) on a VAX-11/750 under MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS (although
we're not actually running any nfs file systems yet). It all worked fine
under 4.2, but with the new and improved cron, I'm sure there is something
trivial I've set up wrong and when I find out what I'll probably kick
myself. In the meantime I have to run expire manually once a week or run
out of spool space. Anyway, in /usr/lib/crontab we have the following:
% grep news /usr/lib/crontab
0 1 * * * news /usr/new/lib/news/daily
45 21,23,1,3,5 * * * news /usr/new/lib/news/nightly.q2h
30 2 * * 6 news /usr/new/lib/news/weekly
50 3 15 * * news /usr/new/lib/news/arbitron
The first line is supposed to run a shell script which runs expire.
The latter three (and other stuff in crontab) work fine, so it's not some
generic cron problem. News is a valid uid:
% grep news /etc/passwd
news:RqRhg/7Lo5XJU:65:12:& System:/usr/spool/news:/bin/csh
/usr/new/lib/news is a symlink to /usr/lib/news, which in turn is a
symlink to /4.2usr/lib/news for historical reasons. The shell file looks
like this:
% cat /usr/lib/news/daily
#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/lib/news
expire -e 7 -a net.sources,net.sources.bugs,net.sources.games,net.sources.mac,mod.amiga.sources,mod.mac.sources,mod.sources,mod.sources.doc,mod.sources.games,comp.sources.d,mod.amiga.binaries,mod.mac.binaries
expire -e 7 -n all,all.all,all.all.all
expire -e 2 -I -n mod.map
If I manually do "/usr/new/lib/news/daily &" as root, it works
fine. I don't see how it can be a permission problem because all the
various files are owned or readable by news:
% ls -ld /usr/new/lib/news
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 13 Feb 15 10:31 /usr/new/lib/news@ -> /usr/lib/news
% ls -ld /usr/lib/news
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 16 Feb 3 15:44 /usr/lib/news@ -> /4.2usr/lib/news
% ls -ldL /usr/lib/news
drwxrwxr-x 4 news 1536 Apr 3 10:15 /usr/lib/news/
% ls -l /usr/lib/news/daily
-rwxr-xr-x 1 news 305 Mar 15 08:47 /usr/lib/news/daily*
So? What did I do wrong?
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
"you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"