multiple cron cause problem

multiple cron cause problem

[Michael Chen]

Dear all,

As many users did, cron starts with bash. (probably in .barshrc)
But we keep open new terminal, because of more jobs or previous termial
deadlock.
Thus we started many cron process at different time.
Will this cause problem?

I observed that cron procedures remain in the windows NT Task Manager even
after the terminal finish or be throttled.
Is it supposed to be?

It is also observed that cygwin.bat in the distribution, which uses NT
termial + bash is worse at terminating cron, while xterm+bash is better at
cleaning up.

Any ideas?

Michael Chen


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Re: multiple cron cause problem

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Michael Chen (2004-03-02 12:08 +0100)
> As many users did, cron starts with bash. (probably in .barshrc)

Sorry? Cron is a normal windows service and a look into your .bashrc
would advise you: "grep cron ~/.bashrc". And bash is not the default
shell for cron - if you meant this - but "sh": "man 5 crontab".

> But we keep open new terminal, because of more jobs or previous termial
> deadlock.
> Thus we started many cron process at different time.
> Will this cause problem?

Cron is not started via bash and it doesn't use a terminal.
 
> I observed that cron procedures remain in the windows NT Task Manager even
> after the terminal finish or be throttled.
> Is it supposed to be?

Sorry, but again: cron has nothing to do with your terminal. It
"forks" when it executes a new job and terminates afterwards.
 
> It is also observed that cygwin.bat in the distribution, which uses NT
> termial + bash is worse at terminating cron, while xterm+bash is better at
> cleaning up.

Definetely not as cron is a normal windows service and runs in the
background - so no terminal is involved at all (Windows console, rxvt,
xterm).

I think you have a totally wrong or missing impression of what cron is
and what it does. Please read the manpage of cron and crontab and
/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README

Thorsten


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Re: multiple cron cause problem

[Thorsten Kampe]

*Please do NOT send private email*

* Michael Chen (2004-03-02 20:12 +0100)
> I read /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README

I doubt that.

> and see that cron in cygwin is actually a windows 2000 service,
> surprising!

It is not by itself. You have to install it as described in the
readme.

> But does it mean I shoud see cron in the NT Task Manager once
> windows 2000 starts?

If you set the start type of the service to "automatically", yes.
Otherwise no.

> I checked carefully, and it is not there.

Either you didn't install it as a services or it isn't run
automatically: read /var/cron/log, the system and application entries
in the eventviewer.

> Without calling it from termail, cron won't do anything on my
> machine.

As you stated it DOESN'T DO ANYTHING EVEN WHEN CALLING IT FROM A
SHELL. What do yo type? - "net start cron"?

> I editted my crontab file /var/cron/tabs/Administrator to let it
> write date to a log file every minute and nothing happens!

I and others already told you that your command line is totally wrong.
You didn't even bother to test it in a shell. Do you expect cron to
compensate for your inability in testing?!

> By the way, cron man page says that it send output to user. But I
> didn't see 'mail' or 'sendmail' package in Cygwin. Why?

Because you didn't read /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/cron.README. There it
says that "Mail is send using /usr/sbin/ssmtp instead of using
sendmail". It does it even if there is no ssmtp by redirecting output
and error messages to "~/dead.letter".


Thorsten


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