[ILUG] cron strangeness

[Aine Douglas]

On 8/19/06, Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie> wrote:
> Instead, what seems to be happening is that find does indeed find the
> directory, but when it tries to rm it, it can't do so, because it's
> no longer there. But for the life of me, I can't imagine what is
> removing the directory between the time find finds it, and when it
> tries to remove it (a rather small window).

The closest anomoly I have ever witnessed to this, and perhaps your
experience will allow you to discount this immediately, was on a SuSE
Linux Enterprise server. I was working on a very slow data link at the
time, but living 20mins from my companies datacenter which I had 24 x
7 walk in access to. What I would do is remotely download large files
and drive down and take them away on a USB external hardisk.

I would sometimes do a similar operation for uploading files, iso images etc.

The problem I would get was checking the "progress" of the data
transfer, as the host I used only had USB 1 ports, and large file
transfers were taking in the region of an hour or two while I froze my
butt off in the aircon streams. I'd periodically check progress by
operning a terminal, and doing ls -lh and viewing the filesize.

What I found was that once I ran the command once, the output was
cached, and I got out of date info until I opened a fresh terminal.
What I'd do is work on the virtual consoles, and I could get
contradictory outputs from the same command by switching to a
different console, ie, console at Alt-F3 says the file size is 500Mb,
switch back to console Alt-F2 and it says its 200Mb, all from the same
command in the same directory location.

So what I'm thinking is that in your case, if your cron program is not
getting a clean shell, it could be receiving cached filesystem info,
and thus finding files that have since been deleted. Obviously it'll
throw an error then when you try to delete an non existent file.

afaik... that machine was running a 2.4 kernel, 2.4.19 if I remember
rightly, a suse "enterprise" server specific build....

> Any wild ideas?

Seems like a relatively sein idea from here, but no doubt the list
will come alive and explain my anomoly and prove it to be a _very_
wild suggestion!

HTH,

Aine.



> Niall
>
>
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