On 11/05/2014 11:43, Filip wrote:
On Sun, 11 May 2014 10:37:31 +0100 Ron Leach<ronleach@tesco.net> wrote:I'm missing some aspect of cron configuration, or perhaps some other cron file somewhere. root doesn't have a /home directory, so there isn't a crontab in it, and the only user existing on the system doesn't have a crontab in its home directory, either.Look in /var/spool/cron/crontabs. That is the location of the per-user crontabs. If someone copied the line 17 * * * * root cd /&& run-parts--report /etc/cron.hourly in there, you would get the error you mentioned, because root will be interpretet as the command to run, because these crontabs have a different format.
First, thank you and Andrei for removing the 'mystery' of where the other crontabs are; relieved, thank you both.
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root indeed contains exactly the error you mention:
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall. # (/tmp/crontab.jE2KHC/crontab installed on Fri Dec 31 08:54:50 2010) # (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $) # /etc/crontab: system-wide crontab # Unlike any other crontab you don't have to run the `crontab' # command to install the new version when you edit this file # and files in /etc/cron.d. These files also have username fields, # that none of the other crontabs do. SHELL=/bin/sh PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin # m h dom mon dow user command 17 * * * * root cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourlyFilip, the comment suggests that I shouldn't edit this file here. Do you have any idea where, or what, its 'master' version might be? When we first built the server, we used webmin to obtain some visibility of system administration things, and we did use webmin's cron management facility. We long ceased doing so, the current regular backups are written directly into /etc/crontab, for example. But I mention webmin in case it might have placed that warning in this file. If so, then I'm happy changing root's crontab here because we don't use webmin any more, anyway, and it won't change this file. But, if this file is managed from somewhere else, changing the file here would probably be the wrong thing to do.
regards, Ron