From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2) Gecko/20040301 Description of problem: If I execute the following from a user's interactive shell: echo "test email" | mail -s"test subject" user It works fine...mail shows up. If I put the same command line in a cron entry for that same user (and user is active in /etc/cron.allow), it fails to generate an email. Adding ">/tmp/cron.email.log 2>&1" produces the following output: Memory fault I've tried putting the command in a simple shell script, and again it works from interactive but not from cron. Even specifying /bin/mail doesn't help...it still produces "Memory fault". Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vixie-cron-3.0.1-63 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: see above description Additional info:
a web search turned up a vague statement about a bug in some versions of cron under the 2.4 linux kernel. The statement talked about cron not handling stdin, stdout, and stderr correctly so that subsequent spawned jobs fail. The link is http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0109.2/1249.html It's an older message (Sep 2001) so I don't know if it is still valid or not, but I've been unable to find any place where vixie-cron is updated beyond what RedHat AS2.1 update 3 provides.
This should be fixed first in vixie-cron-3.0.1-94 in FC/devel (aka rawhide).
Are there any workarounds? Is there any expected date as to when this would be available/supported under RH AS 2.1?
I think this is a duplicate of bug 53078. Hopefully there will be an update for RHEL 2.1 soon to fix this and other issues. :)
This is now fixed in vixie-cron-4.1-1+(7).
I do not see this available through rhn.redhat.com under the AS 2.1 channel. When will this be available for download for AS 2.1?
This bug is closed because it is fixed in the latest version of cron (vixie-cron-4.1) . To get this 'new major release' update pushed to the RHEL 2.1-AS updates channel, please contact your Red Hat support representative; I can only submit updates to 2.1 if they are specifically requested by support.