Right on, Pierre! Thanks a lot for the clue. Finally I figured it out. There were two problems.
The first problem, yes, I was a bit impatient and should've waited one more minute. It seems crontab change does take more than one minute to be effective. Once I changed it to "* * * * *", I saw an error message in /var/log/messages saying "(CRON) error (can't cd to HOME)", which is the second problem. For the record, my cygwin auto-generated /etc/passwd shows my home dir to be "/cygdrive/h", which is an NT mounted share - not sure why is it set to that and why cron couldn't cd to it. Anyway, I changed it to "/home/tzhou" and viola, the cron is working. Again, huge thanks for the help. Ting > -----Original Message----- > From: Pierre A. Humblet [mailto:pierre.humb...@ieee.org] > Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:59 PM > To: Ting Zhou > Cc: cygwin@cygwin.com > Subject: Re: cron does not do anything > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Ting Zhou" <> > Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:33 PM > > > Thanks for the quick response. The crontab line is literally like: > > 28 19 * * * /usr/bin/touch /tmp/abcd > > Pierre, attached is the fgrep result of all the logs in /var/log. > "cron.log" was created but is > empty all along. > > Let me know if I can supply further diagnostic information. > > ****************** > Right, cron does nothing. But ... > The job is supposed to run at 19:28 every day > You started cron at 19:26:30, it's not clear if the crontab existed then. > You edited the crontab at 19:27:19 > When 19:28 came, cron reloaded the crontab but did not run anything. > I don't know if it's by design or not, you are playing it close. > Have you tried using * * * * * in the crontab while you are debugging this? > > Also try running a command like "env" that produces an output. > It should appear in ~/cron.log or in /tmp/cronXXXX if there is a problem. > > Finally your group is mkgroup-l-d. This suggests that /etc/group > may not be up to date. > > Pierre -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
