Shell Programming and Scripting

Are you user "root"?
Is this a "root" cron?
How long have these crons been running live?
Could there be lots of copies running?

I wonder if the script contains some sort of perpetual loop and it never stops?
What's in the script?
How do you normally stop the script?

Its not running as root. Its a different user.

These scripts start just after midnight daily and poll for a file every 15 mins. There is a timer in the script which ends the scripts once 1340 mins have elapsed. So it dies automatically towards the end of the day.

If you look at the log file timestamps, yesterdays script finished at aroung 11:25 PM and new set of scripts got triggered early morning even though there were commented in the cron file -

I am trying to figure out how this cron is triggering even though I have commented it.

Should I open a new thread?

Thanks
Sumeet

Have you looked in the cron log (usually /var/adm/cron/log but check your "man cron" page) to check if these jobs are still being invoked by cron?

Stating the obvious, but did you use "crontab -e" to edit the crontab - or some other method?

As this is a non-root cron, do you find processes with likely start times with say:

Code:

ps -fu<username>
i.e.
ps -fuestdm2

I'm still theorising that the script never stops and that it interrogates the date inside a sleep loop which causes the filename to change. Big guess.

ps -fu estdm2 does not give the poll script process.

I dont have read permissions on cron log. I have requested for bouncing the server.

I dont use crontab -e. I have a file with cron entries and I bind that with crontab - crontab cron.

You might have syntax errors in your crontab that prevent it from using it, keeping the old one instead.

Does it give anything which is not attached to a terminal or which has high CPU usage?
It may just show as a Shell process with no command line. You may have killed the parent process.

A "kill -9" is a last resort and can leave orphan looping processes - similar to when users don't log out properly. If you have orphan looping processes they should show with the "top" command. Be careful because a busy database process could look similar.

We kill looping processes sometimes. The most common are shell menu scripts.