erc@Apple.COM (Ed Carp) (06/27/91)
Howdy, gang!! I'm having multiple problems with cron that are making me tear my hair out: (1) cron will sometimes not run jobs scheduled. It's like cron starts up, then ignores anything that's in crontab. If cron is killed and restarted, it runs OK. (2) some shell scripts just plain won't run from cron, even though they will run from the console or from a remote terminal. I've checked for the obvious stuff, like screen stuff or reads from /dev/tty, stuff like that. (3) sometimes jobs will just hang cron. It's like cron does a fork and an exec, then waits for the child to finish before it does anything else. I'm about to toss cron out the window and use vixie-cron, or a homemade version, but that would not make my boss too happy, since he paid lots of $$$ for the system, and he (not unreasonably) expects the thing to run. Me? Hey, I'm a hacker by trade -- I'd replace the damned kernel if I had another to replace it with! :) Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Oh, I'm running Ultrix 4.0 RISC (Decstation 5000). Email would be appreciated! -- Ed Carp N7EKG/6 erc@khijol.UUCP ...uunet!khijol!erc Packet: N7EKG @ N6IIU.#NOCAL.CA.US UUWEST Consulting Alameda, CA 415/814-0550 Computers HAVE caused a revolution in how much information we can safely ignore! --robs@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Rob Schaeffer) -- Absolutely unabashed Gates McFadden groupie! --
mellon@nigiri.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) (06/28/91)
Hm. I'm using Ultrix cron quite happily, and have never run into the problems you've mentioned. The main wins about Paul's cron have to do with featurefullness, not with basic functionality. I wonder if you're setting your path in your shell scripts? I've run into problems from time to time where I test a shell script while logged in, and it works just fine, but when I run it from cron, nothing happens. In every case, it's been because I assumed that I'd get the same path from cron that I normally get when I login. In fact, /usr/ucb isn't present in the path you inherit from cron, and some other things you may assume are present also are not. _MelloN_