Novice administrator cron problem

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <1991Mar8.142712.1060 at magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu> talley at hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (James T. Talley) writes:
>You write:
>>What's happening is that you've got two copies of cron running. Look-
>>$ ps -ef |grep cron
>>    root   125     1  0  Mar  4  ?        0:07 /etc/cron
>>    root 21856     1  1 15:31:25 ?        0:00 /etc/cron
>>    root 21858 21850  4 15:31:29 a0       0:00 grep cron
>
>Well, mine looks like this -
>delphic.root 1 # ps -ef | grep cron
>    root   108     1  0  Mar  4  ?        0:06 /etc/cron
>    root  2821  2787  4 09:16:22 p0       0:00 grep cron
>
>I've even restarted the system a couple of times.  (It's used for
>development right now.  I can pretty much do any thing I want with
>it.)
>
>I did some editing of crontab files with a text editor before I read
>about the crontab command.  I thought that this might be the problem,
>but now there's nothing funny in the /usr/spool/cron/crontabs
>directory (crontab, lp, and root are empty, adm is commented out, and
>uucp has three lines).

Well, that rules out the other possibility (that two files in the crontabs
directory had the same commands).

Is your /etc/inittab set up correctly? You haven't got two invokations of
cron in there? I know, they'd show up with the ps...

What about at jobs?

I think your best bet is to add a few lines to root's crontab. Have it run
a ps -ef just before and just after the uucp cron job is supposed to execute.
That will tell you if there are really two crons then, and perhaps give a
clue as to what's starting up the second cron.

BTW, don't get fooled by the cron job- for a few moments ps will show a newly
created job as being a second cron. (Or something like that. I noticed this
long ago.)

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis