cron pile up! Lot's of "cron: running job (cron)"

[Ian Smith]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:18:31 -0600 Kevin Kinsey <kdk at daleco.biz> wrote:
 > Rudy wrote:
 > >> The thing is, sometimes it runs fine, other times it backlogs (It may 
 > >> complete at a latter date... the PID 82253 is still waiting ... Gonna 
 > >> see it it completes instead of killing all the stuck crons...).
 > >>
 > > 
 > > All the crons are cleared out right now... 'ps' shows only crond.  
 > > Related to putting the other cron job in " marks???
 > > 
 > 
 > Well, I think I messed up in my suggestion, by omitting the
 > CRON at the end.  My point/thought was, put the entire command
 > "/path/to/script.sh  ARG" in quotes.
 > 
 > Cron is pretty archaic, and I wondered if it was trying to
 > run "/path/to/script.sh" and "ARG" as two jobs instead of
 > one, and hanging on "ARG" since CRON is something of a 
 > reserved word.  IANAE, YMMV, and all that.

MMV :)  The following has been merrily running on three boxes, the
oldest of them for, um, 9.5 years: 

*/5     *       *       *       *       root    /root/bin/ipfwsnap cron

Yes, 'cron' is a checked and logged argument to ipfwsnap.  Various other
/etc/crontab entries demonstrate no need to enclose arguments in quotes,
except where they'd be necessary anyway - as per examples in crontab(5)

Cheers, Ian