[ILUG] cron: error: bad hour

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:51:04 +0100
  | From: "Chris Boyd " <chris.boyd at usit.ie>
  | 
  | Debian Etch 4.0. I was trying to get a script to run from crontab.
  | I've edited it several times and now cron doesn't seem to be running.
  | I'm getting the following from syslog:
  |[ ... ]
  | Aug 13 17:22:53 usit-mail cron[15090]: Error: bad hour; while reading /etc/crontab
  |[ ... ]
  | This is my crontab...I can't see what is wrong with the syntax.

 weird character someplace?
 I don't see any looking at the raw e-mail,
 but MUAs and cut-and-paste have a nasty habit
 of messing things up, so that doesn't mean too much.

 the one slightly odd thing I noticed is the line
 after the setting of PATH is not empty, but seems
 to consist of one(?) space.  whilst I _think_
 that's Ok (for GNU cron), you might want to ensure
 the apparently-empty lines to be really empty.

 also, what is are differences between the a
 working version crontab (ideally the last one
 that worked) and the one posted?  presumably,
 the problem is somewhere in those differences?
 (perhaps you should pull a working one from a
 recent backup — to compare —  if you don't have
 any other saved copy.)

cheers!
	-blf-

p.s., hint to programmers, designers, QA folk,
     and managers: this is a case where a better
     error message — in this case, more feedback,
     such as both the line number and unexpected
     character — would be a great help.
     error messages are important!

-- 
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