The /etc/crontab with vcron seems to contain an extra field which looks like a "run-as" field, which is defined as "root". However no where in vcron's manpage does it specify that field. As a result a dead.letter is created in root's home directory every time one of the cron entries is run, this is because it attempts to run the command "root" which doesn't exist. Contents of the dead.letter contain: /bin/sh: line 1: root: command not found Interestingly enough though this seems to only happen on my sparc Gentoo box, and not my amd64 or x86 box.
what versions of sys-apps/crontab and sys-apps/vcron do you have installed?
cronbase = 0.2.1-r3 vcron = 3.0.1-r4 I was running only 'sparc' and still had the problem (fresh install), so I unmasked ~sparc and emerged the latest available, still problem persists. I removed the column that has the word "root" in it, I assume it's a run-as field. After removing that and reloading the cron it works fine. Oddly though, this doesn't happen on my x86 or amd64 box running the same cronbase and vcron.
This doesn't seem to happen with the new vixie-cron ebuilds. Please re-open if they're still broken for you (don't forget to etc-update first).
