Solaris

hi,
i have crontab where i have put my db backup scripts but crontab do not run at specific time. i have checkted the scripts andwhen run the script as ./mydbbkp.sh so it successfully run and do the job but from cron it is not running whihcmeans cron is not running. i have an oracle user under whihc i want to run cron. i tried to fire fol as oracle user

tail -50 /var/cron/log
log:Permission denied


anyhelp why my crontab s not running

regards

Redirect standard output and standard error to a logfile and check it after the scheduled time. Check the mail of the OS user (oracle) too.

Hello,

Seems like you don't have permissions to check the logs.
you should be root user to do so.(according to by default permissions)



Thanks,
R. Singh

It all depends on how you modified the crontab. Did you use the proper tools or did you edit it directly?

Let's not talk about your specific problem for a moment and just say a few things about the cron daemon in generic Unix terms.

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The cron daemon starts at boot time and loads all the user crontabs into memory. It makes a note of the last modified date/time of each table.

Periodically the daemon will wake up and go and check the user crontabs on disk to see if any of them have changed (by checking again the date/time modified). If it finds that it doesn't have the latest copy of a crontab in memory, it will reload that table and any new cron jobs will be scheduled. Until that time the new jobs will not be run.

So if you were to modify a crontab directly scheduling a job to run one hour later then don't expect it to work.

The workaround would be to stop and restart the cron daemon (see cron man page) but you would need to be root to do that.
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Perhaps you just need to wait up to 24 hours to see if it begins to run your new cron job.

If you use the proper tools to insert a new cron job then cron knows that you've done it and the job will schedule immediately.

Hope that helps.