crontab

[kkubasik]

I am attempting to run the script /home/kevin/bin/getmyemailnow every 10 minutes, i have made the following entry into my /etc/crontab on my gentoo system
*/10 * * * * kevin /home/kevin/bin/getmyemailnow
but it doesn't seem to run, im sure im missing some stupid permissons thing, but i can't seem to find evidence of any problems in my system logs (but i could have easily missed something) Any ideas?

[xylex_blaiste]

do you have the service running? i always forget this.. .

[kkubasik]

the cron service? yes, it is running. All the other jobs listed are completed.

[jeremy1701]

qub333,

A couple of things. First, I think you have it set to run every day at hour ten (10:00 am). I thought the syntax was minute hour. I could be wrong about that, and maybe that's what the */10 is. Why not just use 10,20,30,40,50 * * * * ? Also, you have Kevin in there before your command and I don't get why. Will it work if you take that out? One more thing... Are you in cron.allow and not in cron.deny?

Cron has always been like 50x more difficult then it needs to be.
Jeremy

[kkubasik]

i thought a user had to be declared, as for the kevin, ill check the time syntax and see how that goes.

[jeremy1701]

Oops, I edited this after you saw it.

Jeremy

[sarumont]

The time syntax is correct. */10 will run every ten minutes. You have to specify the user that the job is to run under...this is his second field. Everything looks good from here...Can you run the file normally from a shell?

[kkubasik]

yeah, infact ,y s-claws launcher is

/home/kevin/bin/getmyemailnow %% syphleed-claws

its got me quite confuzzled

[sarumont]

Did you check your /etc/cron.{allow,deny} ? Can you run other cronjobs as kevin?

[hali]

Did crontab read the file after you changed it?

For normal user crontabs I would recommend using the 'crontab -e' command to edit it and not the manual way.

Btw, for those of you not familiar with vi just do a 'export EDITOR=<your-favorit-editor>" before running "crontab -e".