Cron Job Running Even Though Hashed Out

[lambic]

Hi,

We have a backup job in our root crontab which is hashed out, the entry reads:

#00 22 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/local/backup

However, the job still runs each night at 22:00!

Anybody any idea why?

Cheers!

 

[ZaSter]

Did you use "crontab -e" to edit the crontab or did you edit the file with "vi" or the equivalent?

crontab -e does the right thing. Editing the file by hand does not.

 

[KenCunningham]

As a general rule, it's not good practice to edit the crontab directly using crontab -e in case of slipups and typos which would cause the crontab not to work thereafter.

That said, we all do it! However, for safety it's best to do:

crontab -l > crontemp
edit crontemp to make your change
crontab crontemp - to activate the change.

If there are errors, the crontab won't be changed and you'll be warned that this is the case. Just re-edit crontemp until the change is accepted.

Hope this helps.

 

[lambic]

Hi,

I think it was edited with crontab -e, but I'll re-do it just in case....

Thanks for the replies!

Cheers!

 

[lambic]

Crontab now working OK - thanks everyone.

Cheers!

 

[coffeysm]

I dont like to use crontab -e to edit my cron files. What I do is vi it manually, then you have to stop and restart the cron to make your changes. vi /var/spool/cron/crontabs/username - make changes
/etc/init.d/cron stop && /etc/init.d/cron start