Hello, Cron is now working. The problem was (is) what I consider to be a bug which I'd call "Inconsistent behavior of crontab and cron with regard to the newline character".
1. When using "crontab -e" to edit the user crontab file, crontab refuses to accept a newline character (pressing return) at the end of the last crontab entry. It complains saying something like "invalid minutes field". However this last line, without the linefeed, is parsed well and accepted as a valid entry by crontab. 2. On the other hand, Cron, the guy who actually does the job, requires a line feed at the end of each entry, otherwise it'll ignore whatever is written there! So, at the end, that "valid" last entry that crontab accepted (and enforced not to have a linefeed) is ignored by cron. I think this is inconsistent; either both pieces require the linefeed or both ignore it. In my case neither the user crontab file nor the /etc/crontab file were working. My solution with the former was to write my single-line user crontab file like this: 0 */6 * * * /usr/sbin/fetchmail 2>&1 >/dev/null # Note the hash (#) in the second line which is treated as a comment. This is ok with both crontab and cron. My solution with /etc/crontab was just to add a linefeed at the end, which I always do. When I decided to try /etc/crontab I had spent a few hours already fighting with crontab trying to get it to accept the linefeed in the user crontab file. It seems that I unconsciously refrained from adding the linefeed to /etc/crontab :( Thanks to all of you who tried to help. Pedro I. Sanchez ---------------- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
