Cron job doesn't run

© March 2005 Tony Lawrence

A customer writes:

"We want to use the default cron set up with our Red Hat (/etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily). We have placed files in these directories and they work great. According to the Red Hat Sys Adm guide, we should be able to put files in the /etc/cron.d directory when we want to run them at times other than hourly, daily, weekly. I placed a test file in the /etc/cron.d dir that has the same format as cron. This file is set to run every 5 minutes. It does not run."

The clue there is the "has the same format as cron". Files put in cron.d have a similar format to normal cron jobs, but need one extra parameter. A "normal" crontab file might look like:

 
*/5   *   *    *   *   /usr/local/bin/myjob 
 

but if it is to be put in cron.d it needs a user name before the actual command:

*/5   *   *    *   *   root  /usr/local/bin/myjob
 

See Cron is not working also.

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