Bug 163341

Summary: crond failed to parse entry in a crontab
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Reporter: Hiroki Taira <hiroki>
Component: vixie-cronAssignee: Jason Vas Dias <jvdias>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 3.0CC: hiroki
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Last Closed: 2005-07-15 13:54:58 UTC Type: ---
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crontab file none

Description Hiroki Taira 2005-07-15 11:36:00 UTC 
Description of problem:

crond doesn't fork any commands
after entering entries that can't be parsed.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

vixie-cron-3.0.1-76_EL3

How reproducible:

Creating crontab file in which there are entries
that can't be parsed.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. create the file named "/etc/cron.d/clean_tmp"
2. input the entry like following in the file.

0 */0,6,12,18 * * * root find /usr/local/hde/lc/backup/tmp/session -name ".[0-
9a-f]*" -a -cmin +360 -exec rm -rf "{}" \; >/dev/null 2>&1
  
Actual results:

Any commands in crontab are not executed ever.

Expected results:

same above.

Additional info:

After changing the entry following, crond has got started again.

0 0,6,12,18 * * * root find /usr/local/hde/lc/backup/tmp/session -name ".[0-9a-
f]*" -a -cmin +360 -exec rm -rf "{}" \; >/dev/null 2>&1
Comment 1 Hiroki Taira 2005-07-15 11:36:01 UTC 
Created attachment 116793 [details]
crontab file
Comment 2 Jason Vas Dias 2005-07-15 13:54:58 UTC 
I think cron was confused by the "0 */0..." entry, which is pretty meaningless:
"every hour, skipping 0 hours" - a synonym for "0 0..." .
What was your intention with the "0 */0" entry ?
Yes, cron needs improvement in reporting crontab parse errors - currently, it
simply ignores them, as have all previous versions of cron.
I am currently working on an enhanced version of cron that will report cron
syntax errors, a feature that has been requested before: bug 137962 .

 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 137962 ***