Re: Restarting cron after crontab update

[Roger Price <debian@rogerprice.org>]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2024, Greg Wooledge wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 09, 2024 at 15:59:38 +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
>
> > > I added a username, but crontab -e didn't complain.
> >
> > I still fear your crontab won't do what you expect it to do.
> > Most probably cron will just see what you intended as a user
> > name as part of the command:
> >
> >   rprice /mnt/home/rprice/bark/bark.sh  11 > /dev/null 2>&1
> >
> > will run the command "rprice" on the args "/mnt..."; most of
> > the time this will be a "no such file or so-and-so", sometimes
> > it might lead to surprising results ;-)
>
> This is all correct.  You (Roger) should remove the username field from
> the "crontab -e" variant.  Beyond that, if your command isn't working
> when run from cron, you will need to read the output.  So get rid of
> those redirections, and let it email the output to you.

I let cron e-mail me and saw a demonstration of what you predicted would happen 
if the username is specified.

E-mail with username specified:
  Subject: Cron <rprice@titan> rprice /mnt/home/rprice/bark/bark.sh   4
  /bin/bash: line 1: rprice: command not found

E-mail with no username
  Subject: Cron <rprice@titan> /mnt/home/rprice/bark/bark.sh   4
  Playing Sparc Audio '/mnt/home/rprice/bark/h4.au' : Mu-Law, Rate 8000 Hz, Mono

I have revised my "crontab -e" entirely, and I have once more the pleasure of 
hearing Biff bark the hours.

Thanks very much for your help, Roger