'Lo All, I appear to have sent my box into a timewarp of some kind. I set crontab to run my newly created backup file with * 12 * * * /home/jenny/backups
the contents of /home/jenny/backups are if [ -d /home/jenny/cwp/ ]; then tar -czf /backup/cwpbak.tar.gz /home/jenny/cwp/ fi
if [ -d /home/jenny/ ]; then tar -czf /backup/jen.tar.gz /home/jenny/ fi
(I'm doing the dir and the sub dir as the contents of /cwp are shortly to be moved elsewhere) This set off as it should, and, wow, the entire computer has gone bonkers. tty0 has reams of computer generated code crunching away like mad, and, on logging in to tty1 (which took a good 20 secs) ps -aux shows masses of extra stuff, for example gzip and the above tar command seem to be running lots of times. Goes up to number 1253. I've tried a CTRL-C and have a nice white message saying "interrupted" but it still is crunching away. I'm about to do a reboot, hopefully that'll sort it out, but can anyone tell me *why* it did this? When I ran the command in there from a cli it executed fine. Jen ("Alarmed" of Burwell) ps. It is now taking 8 years to shut down. :-( Ah - message: " VFS: file-max limit 4096 reached". Oops. No wonder. I'm starting to suspect the * 12 * * *................)