how does cron exec jobs?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 07), Atom Powers said:
> On 6/7/06, Olivier Nicole <on at cs.ait.ac.th> wrote:
> >> How can I simulate a cron job from the shell? There must be
> >> something different about the way cron is executing this
> >> command...
> >
> >Counld be different environment variables set, different working
> >directory...
> 
> That's what I'm trying to find out. The cron man pages are ... empty
> on the subject.
> 
> >Any diagnostic when it hangs?
> 
> Not that I can tell. It runs on schedule but it never clears it's
> locks (which it puts on files at is edits them) as it is supposed to;
> and it does when run from the shell.
> 
> So it truth, it's not so much that it "hangs", it does terminate, but
> it doesn't honor it's lock time-outs like it does when run outside of
> cron.

Try running it from truss (truss -f -o /var/tmp/truss.out mycommand),
and see if there's anything interesting in the log.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com