by Sandeep Patil Leave a Comment

Cron facility can be used to schedule regularly occurring

commands or scripts. Users can submit cron jobs by adding an
entry to their respective crontabs located in /var/spool
/cron/crontabs directory and stored as their login name. Below
are few of the troubleshooting tips and best practices which
can be helpful in many cases.
Important cron files
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The important files related cron are :
File Function
/etc/cron.d
/cron.allow
File containing usernames that have
permission to submit cronjobs
/etc/cron.d
/cron.deny
File containing usernames that dont
have permission to submit cronjobs
/var/cron/log Cron Log file
/var/spool
/cron/crontabs
Directory containing individual crontab
files of all users.
How to edit a crontab
The best way to edit a crontab is using the command crontab
-e. Another way of doing it is :
1. su to the user whose cron you want to change
2. crontab -l > file [ copy the crontab to a fil
3. vi file [ make changes to the file
4. crontab file [ this makes the "file" as
There is no need to restart the cron daemon after this.
Note : If by mistake you simple run only crontab command,
dont try to come out by typing CTRL+D as it will remove all
the entries in the crontab file. Use CTRL+C to come out of
the crontab command.
Check whether cron daemon is running
Check if the cron daemon is running in the system [prior to
solaris 10] :
# ps -ef |grep cron
To start or stop cron daemon use:
# /etc/init.d/cron [stop|start]
In case of Solaris 10, check the for the cron service status :
# svcs -p svc:/system/cron
To make sure cron jobs are running properly, add below entry
in the crontab.
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* * * * * date > /dev/console
This will print the date every minute to the console. You can
also use pts terminal you are working on, if you dont have the
access to console.
Controlling access to crontab
- The file /etc/cron.d/cron.allow can be used to allow users to
submit cron jobs.
- If the cron.allow file is not present cron checks /etc/cron.d
/cron.deny file to see which users are not allowed to submit
cron jobs.
- If a user is present in both the files, the cron daemon checks
the cron.allow file first and ignores the cron.deny file.
- If both files are missing only root can run the jobs.
Check permission and path to the script
Seems silly, but I have seen many people doing this mistake of
not giving executable permissions to the script they want to run
from cron.
# chmod u+x /path/to/script
Also make sure that the cron entry has absolute path to the
script and also to the shell used by the script:
* 5 * * * /bin/bash /path/to/script.sh
Check the cron logs
Many a time the cron log file /var/cron/log clearly points out
the issue in the cronjob. Check for the period in which the
scripts should have run in the cron log. this would most
probably point out the error in the cronjob.
Be careful when emptying a crontab
If you delete all the cron jobs using crontab -e, the command
crontab -l will still show all the cron jobs. this is because
crontab -e does not know what to do with an empty crontab
file. So it does not update any changes. The proper way to
delete all the jobs from the crontab is :
# crontab -r
Check cron permissions
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Sometimes you must have encountered an error error in
message queue open. One of the reasons of this is a wrong
permission to cron and crontab. The proper permissions of
cron and crontab are :
# ls -l /usr/sbin/cron
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root sys 57420 Jan 22 2005 /usr/sbin/cro
# ls -l /usr/bin/crontab
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 20336 Jan 22 2005 /usr/bin/cron
Note the setuid permissions on crontab file.
crontab -e command returns a number
and a ?
Sometimes when you try to edit a crontab file using crontab -e
command, it prints a number and a ?. This is because by
default the editor used by crontab -e command is the default
solaris editor ed and not vi editor. When ed starts up it prints
the number of characters in the crontab file and does not have
a prompt.
To avoid this, simple com out of the ed editor by typing q. Now
set the EDITOR environmental variable to vi and run crontab -e
again :
# EDITOR=vi
# export EDITOR
Password expired for a user
Many a times cron jobs fail because the password has expired
for the user owning the job. In that case you would see below
error in the cron log file /var/cron/log :
Authentication token is no longer valid; new one requ
CRON (oracle) ERROR: failed to open PAM security sess
CRON (oracle) ERROR: cannot set security context
The solution to this problem is to extend the password for the
user :
# passwd -x 10 oracle
Redirection and special symbols and their
meanings
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It is good to know some of the redirection and special symbols
being used when adding an entry to the crontab. Any mistake
in using them may again lead to a cron job failure. An example
of using these symbols in a cron job entry is :
0 5 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'export RAILS_ENV=my_env; c
Redirection symbols
There are 3 standard file descriptors :
1. stdin 0 - Standard input to the program.
2. stdout 1 - Standard output from the program.
3. stderr 2 - Standard error output from the program.
Normally stdin is from the keyboard and stdout and stderr goes
to the terminal. But we can redirect it to a file. One of the most
commonly used (and confusing) redirection is 2>&1. It
means take the standard error output from the command and
send it to the same place where standard output is going.
Other than the most redirection symbols, there are many other
symbols used while entering a cron job entry in the crontab :
; Used to separate two commands on one line
& Run the command in the background
&& Run the following command only if the previous
command completes successfully, (i.e., grep
string file && cat file)
|| Run the following command only if the previous
command did not complete successfully, (i.e.,
grep string file || echo String not found)
( ) The command within the parentheses is
executed in a subshell
= single forward quote Dont assign any
special meaning to any character within these
quotations
\ Take the following character literally. Also used
to escape a new-line character so that a
user can continue a command on more than
one line
Allow variable and command substitution with
these quotations
`command` ` = single back quote Take the output of this
command and substitute it as an argument on
the command line
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India based Unix Admin, Cloud
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