Thanks Pierre, your first suggestion has got this over the line. Given that this development is for a dedicated machine with a single generic username I will stick with the "myself" option for the time being.
The interesting thing is I just managed to configure, successfully start the cron service, and run scheduled tasks with my username which contains a space. -----Original Message----- From: Pierre A. Humblet [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, 22 September 2006 00:07 To: David Rekas; Harig, Mark; cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: cron - error starting a service I am stumped and can only suggest some debugging. Here are some ideas: - Can you start cron running as yourself (option in cron-config) ? Remember, cron won't process users with spaces, but the daemon should keep running. - Can you start anything under cygrunsrv? For example a bash script located in /usr/sbin that writes into some file in /var/log, sleeps for 10 s, then exits - Run as SYSTEM. Ways to do that have been posted on the list. My usual way is to have inetd running with telnetd enabled. Temporarily clear the SYSTEM password field in /etc/password and specify a home dir and a shell for SYSTEM, then telnet into localhost as SYSTEM. Try to launch cron from the shell and see if there is any error message. I will be away for the next 10 days, so don't expect feedback from me past this PM. Pierre -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/