cron.daily questions

[Derek Broughton]

D. R. Evans wrote:

> Derek Broughton said the following at 10/06/2006 11:25 AM :

>> Here's my /etc/crontab.  Clearer?
>> 
> 
> OOoohhh!! /etc/crontab, not the crontabs for individual users. Right; got
> it; so the daily stuff runs at 6:25am.

Probably :-)   

>> 25 6 * * *  root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron ||  \
>>  run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily

That test for anacron says to let anacron handle it if anacron's installed. 
Now, what may be happening in your case - is that your computer is never on
at 6:25am and you don't have anacron installed.  Any machine that doesn't
run 7/24 should probably have anacron.

> The piece of information I was missing is that I am not missing anything
> :-)
> 
> In other words, what I didn't know was that output from cron.daily jobs
> doesn't go anywhere into a log; if there is any output, it gets mailed to
> root. And the fact that I'm not seeing any such mail means that tmpreaper
> isn't producing any output. 

Maybe.  What happens to anything else you mail to root at localhost?  Unless
you're already receiving emails, somewhere, that were sent to root, just
send a test email from your favorite mail client to root at localhost and make
sure you see it.

> (This is different behaviour from other 
> linuces I have used; Mandriva, for example, puts cron.daily output in
> /var/log/messages. One of the things that I have found unsettling with
> Kubuntu is the sparseness of /var/log/messages -- not that it's a problem;
> it's just different from what I'm used to.)

That's not behaviour I've ever seen, but I've only ever used Debian-derived
distros for more than a day or two.  It's not what happens on the Compaq
Tru-Unix system I have access to, either.
> 
-- 
derek