'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 * * *................)
On 26 Jul 2001 12:18:45 +0100, Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:
* 12 * * * /home/jenny/backups
Ouch! Owowowowowowow!
I'm starting to suspect the * 12 * * *................)
With good reason... I think you've just told your machine to run a backup every single minute from 12:00 to 12:59.... What you probably want is something like: 10 12 * * * ...... (ie, at 12:10, run the backup) HTH, Andrew.
On Thu, 26 Jul 2001 Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:
file-max limit 4096 reached". Oops. No wonder. I'm starting to suspect the * 12 * * *................)
Ooops, you want that line to read 0 12 * * * (to match once at 12:00) because you have asked cron to match every minute of the hour 12! that is why you have gazillions of gzips and tars running, cron is reading your crontab every minute and executing your command..... Adam -- This message is Copyleft - all rights reversed Adam
Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:
'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
AFAICS, yes, it's the crontab timing. This means run it every minute as long as hour==12 every day. Use: 0 12 * * * ... instead. You might want to look at anacron; you may find out anacron has actually been set up for you already though. Alexis (who's had plenty of fun with cron before...) -- mip. mip mip.
participants (4)
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Adam Bower -
Alexis Lee -
Andrew John Savory -
Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com