Cron problem

[bigtomrodney]

Hi,
A buddy of mine is trying to set a cron task. I rarely use cron, so I'm not great for answering this one - basically he has a perl script that he needs to run at the start of every hour

0 * * * * username /home/username/public_html/stats/directory/stats.pl

This is what he's running, but it isn't kicking off. The script is marked executable, script runs normally when fired manually. crond is running. Any ideas? btw access to the box is through ssh, so no graphical assistants please

[bigtomrodney]

I have a feeling this might be the username ... Don't think it needs to be there, but jobs running as root have 'root' where I have username above. Any thoughts....

Cheers,
Tom.

[scientica]

it looks syntactically (<-- I think it's the corect term ) right to mee. I'm using vixie-cron and it looks like my lines, the format for whatever format the cron deamon uses it should be documented in "man 5 crontab" (without the 5 you'll end up in 1st man page (the command crontab and not the file)) - are you sure he's not running some "unorthodox" cron? (iirc gentoo install manual mentions 1 or 2 cron's with different format from the "old tried and true")

[nature]

May be the cron daemon should be restarted(u might have done this) and try removing the username
my crontab entry as root
1 4 * * * /u/home/backup.sh