Re: How to start and verify cron?

[Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSw.ab.ca>]

On 2019-07-11 15:20, David Karr wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:56 PM David Karr wrote:
>     On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 4:04 PM Brian Inglis wrote:
>         On 2019-07-10 16:15, David Karr wrote:
>         > On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 10:20 AM Brian Inglis wrote:
>         >     On 2019-07-10 10:55, David Karr wrote:
>         >     > I've checked the user guide and the FAQ, and I can't find any
>         information
>         >     > about how to start cron and verify that it's working.  I found
>         other blog
>         >     > posts on other sites, but some of them are old.
>         >
>         >     Did you run service setup script /bin/cron-config to set up the
>         service?
>         > When I ran that now, it says "Cron is already installed as a service under
>         > account ...", so I assume that means that I did.
>         >     > I had installed cron, and I thought it was working, but now I
>         think that it
>         >     > is not.  If I edit "~/crontab" and then run "crontab -l", it
>         lists the
>         >     > changes I've made to jobs, so at least that is working.  The
>         real job I
>         >     > have didn't appear to be doing what it was supposed to be doing,
>         so I added
>         >     > a new trivial job that just appends output from "date" to a file
>         in my
>         >     > homedir, and after the scheduled time of the job, the file was
>         not created.
>         >
>         >     Messages from cron and other active services should be visible in
>         the Windows
>         >     application event log if you have not set up a syslog service.
>         > I went through it, but I didn't see any indications of issues with
>         cron.  I'm
>         > not sure what to look for, or where in the event log interface.
>         >     > This is the additional job I added:
>         >     >
>         >     >     40,42,44 * * * * date >> /home/<myuid>/date.txt
>         >     >
>         >     > I did find a "/var/log/cron.log", but it is empty, and the
>         modtime is from
>         >     > a few months ago.
>         >     >
>         >     > One blog post I found talks about running "cygrunsrv -I cron -p
>         >     > /usr/sbin/cron -a -D". I just did this, and it reports "The
>         specified
>         >     > service already exists."
>         >     >
>         >     > This is my uname -a output:
>         >     >
>         >     >     CYGWIN_NT-6.1 ... 3.0.3(0.338/5/3) 2019-03-09 19:12 x86_64 Cygwi
>         >     For a more Unix like and self contained Cygwin approach, install
>         syslog-ng, run
>         >     service setup scripts /bin/cygserver-config /bin/syslog-ng-config
>         >     /bin/cron-config, add service dependencies to start up in that
>         order, and you
>         >     should see cron messages in /var/log/syslog if you run elevated:
>         you can also
>         >     run chmod elevated to make /var/log/syslog world readable, or
>         setfacl to add
>         >     user or group read ACLs.
>         > How do I add service dependencies to start up in a particular order?
>         In an elevated cmd or bash shell:
>         elevated > OR # sc config syslog-ng depend= cygserver
>         elevated > OR # sc config cron depend= syslog-ng/cygserver
>         N.B. the "=" is part of each keyword; multiple service dependencies are
>         separated by "/".
>     It's curious that when I bring up the default "Packages" view, filtering for
>     "syslog-ng" doesn't find anything.  I had to switch to the Categories view,
>     and then filtering for that found it.
> After doing all of this, I still can't get cron jobs to work, and I can't get
> any info on why.
> This is the current output from "crontab -l":
> 0       0,12    *       *       *       find /tmp/.logcache/ -type f -mtime +6
> -exec rm {} \;
> 14,15,16,17     *       *       *       *        date >> /home/dk068x/date.txt
> I've tried editing that last one and changing the minutes to include upcoming
> minutes, and then after those minutes, I check the results, and there are none. 
> Nothing in cron.log or syslog-ng.log.

Did you run the <service>-config scripts to setup the services?
Did you restart all services after any changes?

	# for srv in cygserver syslog-ng cron; do \
		for o in -Q -E -Q -S -Q; do \
			cygrunsrv $o $srv; done; done

Check /dev/log:

	# ls -lF --color /dev/log
	srw-rw-rw- 1 SYSTEM SYSTEM 0 Jul 10 12:28 /dev/log=

if you don't see a pink /dev/log with "=" flag, and it's just black with no "="
flag, rm /dev/log and restart syslog-ng as above.

Do not forget to *ALWAYS* shut down all Cygwin services before running setup to
upgrade any Cygwin packages.

You can check the status of all services with a command such as
$ cygrunsrv -VL | sed -Ee '/^Service\s*:\s*/{s//
/;s/\s+$//;s/\s*(\S+)\s+\(Installation\spath\s*:\s*.*\)$/
(\1)/;H;};/^Current\sState\s*:\s*/{s// /;s/\s*$/  /;H;};$!d;${x;s/\n|\s+$|^\s+//g;}'
cron Running   cygserver Running   syslog-ng Running

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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