Re: crontab jobs not running?

[Martin Dickopp <martin-deb@zero-based.org>]

Nitebirdz <nitebirdz@sacredchaos.com> writes:

> I just did this by su'ing as user "jortega" and running 'crontab -e' to
> enter the following lines:
>
> 35 20 * * * /bin/echo "testing" > /tmp/testing
> 35 20 * * * /bin/date > /tmp/time

What happens if you specify `* * * * *' (i.e. every minute) as time
specification?

> This correctly created the file under "/var/spool/cron/crontabs", and it
> also appears to have the correct ownership and permissions.
>
> # ls -l /var/spool/cron/crontabs/
> total 8
> -rw-------    1 root     jortega       278 Mar 17 20:31 jortega
                                                    ^^^^^
> -rw-------    1 root     root          243 Mar 15 18:55 root
>
> Yet, it failed to run at the specified time.  However, I found something
> quite interesting in the "/var/log/syslog" file:
>
> Mar 17 20:40:23 milan crontab[17372]: (jortega) REPLACE (jortega)
> Mar 17 20:40:23 milan crontab[17372]: (jortega) END EDIT (jortega)
         ^^^^^^^^
> Mar 18 02:41:01 milan /usr/sbin/cron[193]: (jortega) RELOAD (crontabs/jortega)

I find the discrepancy between the underlined timestamps very strange.

Does your clock run monotonically, or could it step (possibly because
you run tools which synchronize it to some external reference time)?

If you run `date' and `date -u' from /etc/crontab, what do they show?

Martin


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