was: Re: how to autorun script at startup as administrator? but now a new problem

[Dave Stevens]

Thanks to all who helped.

I thought I'd start off slowly because I have not needed to use cron
explicitly before, so I made a crontab entry that would run a simple
bash command at ten past the hour. Like this:

<snip>

# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
# 
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
# 
# m h  dom mon dow   command

40 * * * * /bin/dmesg

thinking I'd be sure to notice 60k characters scrolling across the
terminal. But no, the hd lamp blinks and syslog shows lines like this
at the relevant time:

Dec 22 15:40:01 dave-900X1B CRON[3715]: (dave) CMD (/bin/dmesg)
Dec 22 15:40:01 dave-900X1B cron[875]: Please install an MTA on this
system if you want to use sendmail! 
Dec 22 15:40:01 dave-900X1B CRON[3714]: (dave) MAIL (mailed 60360 bytes
of output but got status 0x00ff from MTA#012)

I don't in fact have or want a MTA but have no idea why I
don't get the desired output or wtf about email??

d