There are at least two methods of using cron (not including anacron and
"at"). One is the "crontab" command itself, which creates user crontab
files in /var/spool/cron, the other (not in all distros) is to create a
standard crontab entry for a task in /etc/cron.d/.
I just diagnosed a user's cron problems, and discovered that a task he
scheduled would not run because the whole crontab argument was being
interpreted as a comment:
*/10 * * * * joe /usr/bin/foobar # >/dev/null
Thinking he could simply *comment* out the file redirection, and the
output would be sent to syslog. However, (and this had not occurred to
him - or me for that matter), it looks like cron interprets a hash
(pound) symbol at *any position in the crontab argument* as an
indication that the *whole argument* is a comment.
Personally, I think this is broken behaviour, and maybe unique to the
particular release, but anyway, it's a heads-up for anyone having
similar problems ... *remove your comments* from crontab {place them on
a separate line).
vixie-cron-4.1-54.FC5
-
K.
