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Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 16:02:14 -0500 (CDT)
From: Guy Helmer <ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu>
To: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Message to Root Every 5 Minutes
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Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.3.94.960626155210.25242A-100000@alpha.dsu.edu>
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On Wed, 26 Jun 1996, Annelise Anderson wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Jun 1996, Scott Blachowicz wrote:
> 
> > Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm getting the following message sent every five minutes--it ends
> > > up in /var/mail/root:
> > > [...]
> > > root: not found
> > > 
> > > I must have something set wrong--any ideas?
> > 
> > Looks like you got an entry from /etc/crontab into root's cron file in the
> > spool area.  The spool area cron files don't have a username as item right
> > before the command but /etc/crontab does.  You probably want to do a
> > 'crontab -e' to edit the spool area cron file to remove the "root"...or
> > remove that line altogether since it might already be in /etc/crontab.
> 
> I found /var/cron/tabs/root, which is apparently the "real" file.  I
> took out a line I'd added, using crontab to edit and reinstall, and
> rebooted, but this does not help.  This is the only file in that directory.  
> I can't find any "spool area" cron files.  

/etc/crontab is not meant to be installed via crontab(1) - it is special
in two ways: it is automatically read by cron and it has a different
format than individual user crontab files.  If you have used crontab(1) to
install /etc/crontab as root's crontab, you will get the message you
mentioned above each time cron tries to run one of the commands because
/etc/crontab is not in the same format as an individual user's crontab
(see the man page for crontab(5) for details of the format on an
individual user's crontab). 

So, if you make a change to /etc/crontab, *don't* use crontab(1) to put
/etc/crontab into /var/cron/tabs.  If you have done this, you can use
"crontab -u root -r" to remove the installed copy (/var/cron/tabs/root) of
/etc/crontab.

It's confusing behavior...

Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu