Package: cron
Version: 3.0pl1-105
Severity: normal
crontab(5) says:
BUGS
Although cron requires that each entry in a crontab end in a newline
character,
neither the crontab command nor the cron daemon will detect this error.
Instead,
the crontab will appear to load normally. However, the command will
never run. The
best choice is to ensure that your crontab has a blank line at the end.
This is madness. Some notes:
1. The first sentence doesn't make sense, as "this error" doesn't refer
to anything. I suggest that in the first instance the man page could be
fixed, so the second line above reads:
neither the crontab command nor the cron daemon will detect when the
last line does not end in a newline. Instead,
2. From looking at bug #79037, there's a patch to get cron to complain
about this case.
3. I seem to be missing something here: why can't cron simply treat EOF
as if it were newline? This would avoid a) having to document this
problem and b) having to try to warn about it, for which bug #79037 has
one patch which apparently failed and another pending.
[4. Why are we still shipping cron, when fcron has been apparently
capable and planned to take over from cron+anacron for years (and can
already be used in place of anacron)?]
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages cron depends on:
ii adduser 3.110 add and remove users and groups
ii debianutils 2.30 Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii libc6 2.7-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libpam0g 1.0.1-5+lenny1 Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii libselinux1 2.0.65-5 SELinux shared libraries
ii lsb-base 3.2-20 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
Versions of packages cron recommends:
ii postfix [mail-transport-agent 2.5.5-1.1 High-performance mail transport ag
Versions of packages cron suggests:
pn anacron <none> (no description available)
pn checksecurity <none> (no description available)
ii lockfile-progs 0.1.11-0.1 Programs for locking and unlocking
ii logrotate 3.7.1-5 Log rotation utility
-- no debconf information
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