Re: Cronjobs get the wrong time stamp in mail record

[David Liontooth <liontooth@cogweb.net>]

Wayne Topa wrote:

> David Liontooth(liontooth@cogweb.net) is reported to have said:
>> 
>> I'm running a script as a cron job on four machines, and get an e-mail
>> every time the job is completed. On three machines, the time stamp is the
>> time of the completion of the job; on the last one, the time stamp is
>> five minutes earlier. I've checked the time on the machine; it's correct
>> (maintained with ntpdate). What could possibly be causing a mail to be
>> timestamped five minutes (consistently) before the cron job it reports is
>> over?
>> 
> It would help if you, at least mention, which version of cron, and
> what you are running (stable, etch, testing, or unstable).  Also the
> same info on the machines that are working.  This list can give you a
> lot of help but only if you help us, help you.
> 

Hi Wayne,

Thanks -- this is Debian sid with cron 3.0pl1-99 and exim4 4.63-11 with
exim4-base, exim4-config, and exim4-daemon-light. I'm just wondering in
principle what could cause the timestamp to drift -- isn't it created when
the job is done? 

The typical e-mail receipt looks like below -- note that at the bottom it
says the job completed at 19:59:56 yet the e-mail is dated 19:46:03. How is
this possible?

Dave

Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:46:03 -0800
From: Cron Daemon <root@pisa.cogweb.net>
To: tna@cogweb.net
Subject: Cron <tna@pisa> channel 60, 60min, "On the Record with Greta", 4

Using pisa's drive tv1 with 195GB free
Preparing to record 2006-12-22_1900_FOX-News_On_the_Record_with_Greta
Initiating recording by pisa of
2006-12-22_1900_FOX-News_On_the_Record_with_Greta from channel 60,
on capture card 4, at 19:00:02, duration 3594 seconds
MP3 audio selected.
Forcing audio preload to 0, max pts correction to 0.

1 duplicate frame(s)!

1 duplicate frame(s)!

1 duplicate frame(s)!

CBR audio: 16000 bytes/sec, 576 bytes/block

-rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna 421921446 2006-12-22
19:59 /tv1/2006/2006-12/2006-12-22/2006-12-22_1900_FOX-News_On_the_Record_with_Greta.avi
-rw-r--r-- 1 tna tna     59703 2006-12-22
19:59 /tv1/2006/2006-12/2006-12-22/2006-12-22_1900_FOX-News_On_the_Record_with_Greta.txt

Completed capture by pisa on Friday 22 December 2006 at 19:59:56
Video and audio   file size 403M
Closed captioning file size 60K