going crazy with crontab

English Applications
1

I’m just tired to fight, can’t start even simple xterm:

crontab -e
0 13 * * * /usr/bin/xterm
just nothing
vi /etc/crontab
0 13 * * * root /usr/bin/xterm
guess what

Have tried with cron reloading, changing of shell and lot of other s… pls help

2

Won’t work because when the command runs there is no DISPLAY environment. A cron job is not tied to your current environment. When it runs, there could even be nobody logged in on the console.

3

Hi
cron won’t run a X application like that, it’s meant to run without a
GUI… Please try a simple shell script to test.

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-default
up 2 days 16:14, 3 users, load average: 0.05, 0.14, 0.15
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

4

like that?
0 13 * * * env DISPLAY=:0.0 console --noclose /usr/bin/xterm
nothing happend

5

toldforc wrote:

>
> I’m just tired to fight, can’t start even simple xterm:
>
> crontab -e
> 0 13 * * * /usr/bin/xterm
> just nothing
> vi /etc/crontab
> 0 13 * * * root /usr/bin/xterm
> guess what
>
> Have tried with cron reloading, changing of shell and lot of other s…
> pls help
>
>
What are you trying to do?

If you’re just trying to sample cron functionality, xterm is NOT a good
example program. First, cron won’t have an X display attached, so you won’t
see anything. Nor is there any way to get input to xterm. Also remember
that the default environment is minimal - no .login/.bashrc is run to set up
$VARIABLEs.

Cron is really meant to run programs independent of any interaction -
cleanup scripts, backups, recovery/logging tasks, etc.

6

Nearly but catch the output if you’re ever unsure i.e

16 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/xterm &>/tmp/error.out
7

ok
touch test2
cat > test
#!/bin/sh
rm test2 &2> /var/log/error.out
<ctr+d>
chmod 700 test
crontab -e
0 14 * * * /root/test
then set time to 13:59:30. at 14:00:15 ls showed test2 in /root

8

Thanks
firstly I was trying to schedule bash script to backup post office twice a day. But I’ve noticed nothing happened. So now, I’m just trynig to schedule anything at all. Forgt about xterm, the sh script above doesn’t works to.

9

Is the cron service running?

pidof cron

should print a number.

10

toldforc wrote:

> firstly I was trying to schedule bash script to backup post office
> twice a day. But I’ve noticed nothing happened. So now, I’m just trynig
> to schedule anything at all. Forgt about xterm, the sh script above
> doesn’t works to.

Probably because the test script wasn’t made executable

touch test2
cat > test
#!/bin/sh

ADD THIS HERE -> chmod +x test

rm test2
crontab -e
0 14 * * * /root/test
then set time to 13:59:30. at 14:00:15 ls showed test2 in /root

–
Kevin Miller
Juneau, Alaska
http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
In a recent poll, seven out of ten hard drives preferred Linux.