Hi there:

First off, many thanks to everyone who is putting in time and effort in making cygwin as wonderful as it is.

I'm trying to get what I think is a simple cron job working. So far all I've gotten is frustrated and confused. I'm sure I'm doing something stupid (probably more than one thing), but I don't know what. At this point I have tried many different twiddles and fiddles and so on, with no positive results. Any help gratefully accepted.

I am familiar with cron and crontabs on various flavours of UNIX, but this is my first attempt at getting a cron job working on cygwin.

I have DLed the cron package and gotten it running (possibly wrongly...).

There are no cron.allow nor cron.deny files that I can find.

I have set up a crontab which looks correct to me. I have tried many variants of the actual command - adding a specific shell invocation (having read somewhere that this needs to be a .exe file). The target script works just fine when invoked by hand. I have ensured that the crontab file is written in UNIX format. I have messed around with file permissions so that the target script is not writable, even by me.

However, nothing works. Either:

a) nothing is ever invoked - cronevents shows that the new crontab is loaded, but there's nothing there which shows that the specified command is ever run;

OR

b) I get a gnomic message about the crontab being UNSAFE.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the space in my Windows username may be the cause of the UNSAFE.

Along the way I have fallen over various other curiosities.

'crontab -u' just says "must be privileged", even though I'm running it from an Administrator account.

cron-config talks about using 'passwd -R'  as an option, but when I try this all I get is:
"Storing password failed: Function not implemented" which is unhelpful.

Apart from exhaustive search, there doesn't seem to be any way to search the cygwin mailing list archives - is there such a facility hidden somewhere?

Any help appreciated! cronbug.txt attached

Jonathan