On 2023-05-23 13:46, Jonathan Clark via Cygwin wrote:
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
Hi JC,
You do not appear to be running cron!
Did you set up by running `/usr/sbin/cron-config` from an elevated admin shell
and starting with the default answers?
I would avoid trying `crontab -u USER` under Cygwin as ideas of admin don't
match.
I or config script created empty /var/cron/cron.deny to allow all users (me) to
use cron.
I started off using `crontab -e` and `crontab -l > ~/$USER.crontab` to update
and save, but now just edit ~/$USER.crontab then `crontab ~/$USER.crontab` to
reload.
In my crontab I set:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/home/$LOGNAME/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$PATH
MAILTO=...@...
and never try running anything but non-elevated Cygwin scripts and commands.
I also run cygserver, and syslog-ng with some tweaks, to avoid dealing with
Windows event logs.
[To run elevated Cygwin or Windows scripts and commands, I use Windows Scheduled
Tasks with the SYSTEM account, whether logged in or not, with highest
privileges, running Windows %CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\sh ... with script args or any
other command, making no assumptions about any current directory or user mounts.]
--
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
La perfection est atteinte Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer but when there is no more to cut
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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