On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Cabell, Dale wrote:
How do I get cron to look at my cron scripts in cron.daily or hourly for
that matter? I can execute the script manually (e.g. ./). I did a chmod
755 on the file. Do I need to do a 777?
The difference between 777 and 755 is that 777 would add the
"2" bit (write access) for group members and others. Since
you're not trying to write to the script, that won't help.
Incidentally, I advise using the symbolic chmod notation until
you know the octal stuff off the top of your head. To me,
it's much easier to remember that
chmod u=rwx,go=rx foo
makes foo readable, writable, and executable by the "u"ser,
and only readable and executable by "g"roup and "o"ther than
it is to remember that "755" means the same thing. "755"
does, however, have the advantage that it's quicker to type.
Anyway, a mildly strange thing about Linux is that it turns out
that the scripts in /etc/cron.daily aren't run by cron at all.
Instead, they're run by a command called "run-parts". All this
command does is look in a directory, then run every script it
finds there. This turns out to be handy for scheduling stuff
with cron because your nightly maintenance crud can have just
one cron entry, and then the jobs proceed in an orderly fashion,
one after another.
So, to get cron to run everything in /etc/cron.daily, you need
to add something like this to the crontab (using "crontab -e"
to make changes to root's crontab):
5 3 * * * run-parts /etc/cron.daily
Hope that helps.
- Logan
