crontab and running state not working

ynn · Post by **ynn** » Wed Jun 28, 2006 2:14 pm

I have created crontab and running state called Morning and Night
crontab -l
10 6 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Morning
10 20 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Night
crond is running and cron.allow is already created

but the running state is not changed after the time passed.
do i need to run or create anything else to make cron working?

thanks.

voronwe · Post by **voronwe** » Wed Jun 28, 2006 10:30 pm

Hi ynn

If my memory serves me right then what you need to change is the following. :

Code: Select all

10 6 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl 'Morning'

10 20 * * * root /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl 'Night'

The changes are the little ' surrounding the state name.

Flash_ · Post by **Flash_** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:10 am

Shouldn't need the quotes - but the state IS case-sensitive.

Also I never specified a user, but that shouldn't be the problem.

Does it work when you run zmpkg.pl from the command line to switch states?

ynn · Post by **ynn** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 11:27 am

Yeah I just got it worked out with these:
10 7 * * * /usr/bin/sudo -u apache /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Morning >> /root/logfile.txt 2>&1
10 17 * * * /usr/bin/sudo -u apache /usr/local/bin/zmpkg.pl Night >> /root/logfile.txt 2>&1

Thanks.

Flash_ · Post by **Flash_** » Fri Jun 30, 2006 6:30 am

Ahh, sudo. Ubuntu by chance?

ynn · Post by **ynn** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 6:18 am

been using Centos4.3, have never been using ubuntu. is it better than fedora ?

Flash_ · Post by **Flash_** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 8:19 am

Ah, sorry. The sudo thing is something that marks Ubuntu out as different in usage to many other distros, i didn't know Centos used sudo too.

Glad you got it sorted out.

Post by **cordel** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 9:31 am

Actually sudo in in most distro's or I should say that I know it is in Mandriva/Mandrake, Suse, Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. It's part of the common command set for Linux.

Regards,
Corey

Flash_ · Post by **Flash_** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 7:27 am

In most distros, but not installed by default (certainly not Debian).

My reason for mentioning Ubuntu is because that uses only sudo, not su at all - and it's a common problem that crops up in many web forums for people coming from other distros to it. This would've applied to crontab as in most distros you'd use root's crontab, or zmuser's crontab to invoke zmpkg.pl to change states, and using root's crontab doesn't work with ubuntu (afaik) simply because it doesn't have a root account.

But, as you can see, I was wrong.