I am trying to port a cygwin application that uses cron from a WinXP PC to a Win7 Pro PC and I find some cron jobs won't run. Specifically, I need to run an Excel program from a cron job and this doesn't work on my Win7 PC.
In order to run an Excel program from cygwin I have this run.excel bash script
with an embedded VB script that executes an Excel program:
excel=$1
vbscript=/usr/tmp/$$.vbs
cat <<-! >$vbscript
Dim xlApp
Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.application")
Set xlWb = xlApp.workbooks.Open("$excel")
xlApp.Quit
Set xlWb = Nothing
Set xlApp = Nothing
!
chmod 777 $vbscript
c:/Windows/System32/wscript.exe 'c:\cygwin64\usr\tmp\$$.vbs'
An excel program is run like this:
run.excel 'c:\Shared\Bin\Create_Daily_Scorecard.xls'
When I run an Excel program interactively with this run.excel script it runs
just fine but when I run it via a cron job Excel just hangs. When Excel hangs
I can look at the processes running on the PC using the Windows Task Manager
and I don't see the EXCEL.EXE process. But when I check the option to show
processes from all users I see the hung EXCEL.EXE process, AND the user name
displayed is my login. So I am running this under the Upar2 login and Task
Manager doesn't display EXCEL.EXE as a Upar2 process but when I check 'Show
processes from all users' it shows EXCEL.EXE running under user name Upar2 - a
contradiction.
What I suspect is happening is Excel is attempting to do something that
requires Upar2 permission but it isn't really running as Upar2 so Excel
displays some error message and is waiting for the user to respond. But Excel
is running invisibly so this can't be seen.
I also suspect this Upar2 "confusion" isn't limited to running an Excel
program. I can run a cron job with regular UNIX commands (cut, sort, etc) and
see they are running with the ps command. But when I try to kill them (kill
-9) I get permission denied. If I want to kill a process running via the cron
I have to start cygwin with 'Run as administrator' and then I can kill
processes running under the cron.
So, does anyone know what's going on here and what I need to do get these cron
jobs running. As I noted at the beginning this is being ported from WinXP,
where all this works fine, to Win7.
I set up cron using cron-config like this:
$ cron-config
Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [ ]
Do you want the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) yes
Please enter the password for user 'Upar2':
Reenter:
Running cron_diagnose ...
... no problem found.
Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? (yes/no) yes
OK. The cron daemon is now running.
Denis
cygcheck.out
Description: cygcheck.out
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