cron can't find root or operator

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Thu May 20 17:12:18 PDT 2004


carvin5string wrote:
> --- Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 
>>You've got a user's crontab created in the format of the system
>>crontab.
>>
>>The system crontab has an extra field to designate the user under
>>which
>>the job should run.  When this field is entered in a user's crontab,
>>cron interprets it as the command to be run and the errors you
>>describe
>>generally result.
>>
>>Keep in mind that the user "root" has a user crontab that is
>>different
>>from the system crontab.
>>
>>If you're still fuzzy as to what went wrong, reading the man pages
>>for
>>crontab (in addition to my explanation) should help.
> 
> Bill,
> I see in the Handbook in section 6.6.1 that I should run crontab
> crontab to create a new crontab, which I did, in the /etc directory, as
> root.

Yeah, it does look like it says that, doesn't it?  It doesn't really, and
you shouldn't have done that ...

> Thus the crontab file in /etc looks like this -
> After reading the man page and the one page in the manual I don't know
> what to do to fix this -

What you did was install the system crontab as a user.  Log in as the
user you executed "crontab crontab" as, and enter "crontab -r".  That
will remove the crontab for that user.

On a related note.  I'm going to make some changes to that section of
the handbook in an attempt to clarify it.  Do you mind if I contact you
directly to get your feedback on whether or not my changes make that
chapter easier to understand?

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com


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