From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 20 17:12:18 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C788C16A4CE for ; Thu, 20 May 2004 17:12:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from internet.potentialtech.com (h-66-167-251-6.phlapafg.covad.net [66.167.251.6]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9DDF943D41 for ; Thu, 20 May 2004 17:12:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (pa-plum1c-102.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.179.102]) by internet.potentialtech.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id CBE7C69A7E; Thu, 20 May 2004 20:12:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <40AD495E.4050003@potentialtech.com> Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 20:12:14 -0400 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040506 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: carvin5string References: <20040520205749.4392.qmail@web40409.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20040520205749.4392.qmail@web40409.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cron can't find root or operator X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 00:12:18 -0000 carvin5string wrote: > --- Bill Moran 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