[eyadams]

Yes, I have a shiny new G5 running 10.2.7, and I have two problems:

1. cron doesn't seem to run any of my added tasks
2. things run in the background using nohup are still being killed when the current user logs out

For cron, I tried using "crontab -e" for a regular user, an administrator, and root, and editing /etc/crontab directly, but in all cases the script was not run. Here's the entry I used:

*/5 * * * * * /Users/userhome/dir/script.pl

Or something like that. I'm not at my computer so I may not have the right number of "*", but the "*/5" is right - I have a job I want run every 5 minutes, period. But no love - the script doesn't run.

So I changed my script to run in a loop, sleeping for 5 minutes between loops, and tried nohup:

> nohup script.pl &

And this works, but if I log out the process is killed about 1/2 the time.

Any ideas?

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by eyadams:
Yes, I have a shiny new G5 running 10.2.7, and I have two problems:

1. cron doesn't seem to run any of my added tasks
2. things run in the background using nohup are still being killed when the current user logs out

For cron, I tried using "crontab -e" for a regular user, an administrator, and root, and editing /etc/crontab directly, but in all cases the script was not run. Here's the entry I used:

Is cron actually running? There should be a process running as root like this:

Code:
[arkham@flybook /] ps -auxww | grep cron | grep -v grep
root    399   0.0  0.0    13868    140  ??  Ss   Mon09AM   0:00.63 cron

If that process is not running, you need to fix that first. I remember having to do something to start cron. Anyway, cron is started by /System/Library/StartupItems/Cron/Cron if you need to investigate.

> nohup script.pl &

And this works, but if I log out the process is killed about 1/2 the time.

Not sure why your script is dying when you log out, but it might help to log the standard out/standard error. Instead, run it like this (assuming a bourne shell here):

nohup script.pl > ~/script.log 2>&1 &

If you're using csh or tcsh, do this instead:

nohup sh -c "test.pl > testlog 2>&1 &"