Bug 12822

Summary:	invalid crontab format for vcron
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Vlad Berditchevskiy <vlad>
Component:	New packages	Assignee:	Thilo Bangert (RETIRED) (RETIRED) <bangert>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	major
Priority:	High
Version:	1.4_rc1
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Vlad Berditchevskiy 2002-12-27 23:28:11 UTC

First of all, after vcron is emerged, there are 2 identical crontabs:

/etc/crontab
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

The first one originates from vcron, but portage doesn't seem to be able to
track the second one (i.e. "qpkg -f /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root" returns nothing).

The second problem is that vcron has another crontab format for
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/*. The user name contained in the installed crontab is
interpreted by vcron as a command, but since there is no such command (root),
the following text is emailed to root every 15 minutes:

/bin/sh: root: command not found

vcron considers the crontab name to be the user name (see "man 5 crontab"),
there is one crontab per user, so the user name must not be included in the
crontab contents.

Comment 1 Wayne Davison 2002-12-28 03:05:56 UTC

I emerged vcron on my system earlier today and I don't see this problem.  I
suspect that you typed "crontab /etc/crontab" during the install (which is
required for the other crons, but not vcron).  If so, the fix is just to type
"crontab -r" as root.

Comment 2 Vlad Berditchevskiy 2002-12-28 15:02:35 UTC

Yes, it's possible. Unfortunately it's already out of my .bash_history, but it
would explain, why portage doesn't know anything about the second crontab.