AIX

Hi John, even /usr/bin/cat doesn't work

Well I just run the command:
00,01,02,03 * * * * /usr/bin/cat /dev/null > /var/adm/wtmp 1>/test.out 2>&1
and wtmp now = 0 and the output file test.out is empty which is as it should be.

try ....

Code:

/usr/bin/echo > /var/adm/wtmp

if that doesn't work --- reboot the server and then check again all those other commands you tried ...

btw, how did you reactivate the crontab after your edits?

What do you mean justice when you say how did you re-activate the crontab? There is no need to re-activate anything cron is still running and dynamically reads the crontab!

Hi Johnf, hmm that command of yours work but not mine, what's the difference in the time that you placed? you put it as 00, 01, .... whereas i only put a 1 there as every single minute right? Hi Light, i did not restart the cron but i did try, i used the kill command to restart, with the option -1 followed by the PID. Is that the correct way? John, can you explain please thanks a lot guys.

if the way the crontab was edited is through editing /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root directly, the crontabs may not be updated accordingly until cron is restarted ... if the crontab was edited using "crontab -l > /tmp/file; vi /tmp/file" then cron may not even know of the changes until "crontab /tmp/file" is issued ... if the crontab was updated using "crontab -e" then there is no problem ...

btw, the message i wrote was for smallbook ... you just happened to put in your message while i was composing mine ...

No! The 1 means it will run 1 minute past every hour and no more. The 00,01,02,03 etc... means run every minute on every hour. That is why it was not working. I was to interested in the command to spot the minute / hour entry so I tried it myself to make sure.