From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; zh-CN; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6 Description of problem: I add a new cron task as following: 13 21 * * * ps ax > /tmp/ps.log The task do not run and there is no notification email. But after I restart crond service: service crond restart The cron task runs well. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vixie-cron-4.1-20_EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. add a new crontab task crontab -e : 14 17 * * * ps ax > /tmp/rootps.log 2. 3. Actual Results: The task failed to run without restart crond Additional info:
Actually, I think you'll find that if you wait at least 2 minutes after making the update, it will take effect without crond restart. Currently, crond works by loading any updates when the minute changes ; e.g. at 12:00:00, 12:01:00, and then scheduling the jobs to be run at successive minutes, so if a job is loaded at 12:00, it will not be run until 12:01:00 . So if your '14 17 * * *' job was updated between 17:14:00 and 17:15:59, it would only be loaded at 17:15:00, and would not be run until 17:15 the next day . I am looking at changing this with enhancements to vixie-cron-4.1, which by default behaves this way, but as the updates always do take effect, this is not a bug. If you are finding that an update does not take effect within two minutes, which I cannot reproduce, please re-open this bug.