tag 532578 fixed thanks Hello Reuben,
Reuben Thomas wrote: > BUGS > Although cron requires that each entry in a crontab end in a > newline character, > neither the crontab command nor the cron daemon will detect this > error. Instead, > the crontab will appear to load normally. However, the command will > never run. The > best choice is to ensure that your crontab has a blank line at the end. > > This is madness. Some notes: > > 1. The first sentence doesn't make sense, as "this error" doesn't refer > to anything. A fix has been committed to SVN. cron will now log an error to syslog, and this is described in the man page. > 2. From looking at bug #79037, there's a patch to get cron to complain > about this case. see above > 3. I seem to be missing something here: why can't cron simply treat EOF > as if it were newline? This would avoid a) having to document this > problem and b) having to try to warn about it, for which bug #79037 has > one patch which apparently failed and another pending. because a crontab missing a newline before EOF could be indicative of an error. Under regular circumstances, a crontab created "crontab -e" will *always* have \nEOF, so a lack thereof is suspicious at best. > [4. Why are we still shipping cron, when fcron has been apparently > capable and planned to take over from cron+anacron for years (and can > already be used in place of anacron)?] Probably because it's ubiquitous, present (in various flavors) on BSD and Linux distributions alike. Christian
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