A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

I get messages saying "stat() failed: /tmp/croutPPGa00288: no such file"

Basically, this is normal. When cron runs an at, batch, or cron job, it creates a temp file named /tmp/crout* to hold the stdout and stderr of that job. When the job is finished, it mails the results (if any) to the job's owner and then removes the file.

In the meantime, some other program (probably a filesystem cleaning daemon) has been scanning for whatever purpose. It did this in two passes; first, it got a list of all files it had to consider (probably by asking the shell to expand "/tmp/*" into a list of files); second, it uses stat() to find out information about each one. Between these two steps, the cron job finished and cron deleted the file, so by the time the second job went to get information about the file, it had vanished.

This message is harmless so long as it refers to a cron output temp file. If it refers to some other file, you may want to find out what generated that other file; chances are it's a harmless message, too.

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