[ILUG] cron: error: bad hour

[Brian Foster]

  | From: "Philip Reynolds" <philip.reynolds at gmail.com>
  | Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:44:25 +0100
  | 
  | On 14/08/07, Brian Foster <blf at utvinternet.ie> wrote:
  |  >  weird character someplace?  [ ... ]
  | 
  | set invlist in vim is handy for these things, as well as using od(1)
  | with `od -c' to weed out strange characters in files.

 I cannot find any doc on ‘:set invlist’, albeit
 it seems to be identical to the extremely useful
 ‘:set list’ (which I use all the time!).

 pedantically, ‘od -c’ is good for finding weird
 bytes (esp. in US-ASCII encoded files, as should
 be the case for the OP's /etc/crontab).  for 8-bit
 encodings, and multi-bytes encodings (e.g. UTF-8),
 ‘od -c’ can be more confusing than useful.

 similar to ‘od -c˚ is ‘hexdump -C’ which is often
 a bit easier to decipher.  still works best with
 7-bit encodings, however ....

 qed(1) had a very useful RE expression, ‘\_’ as
 I recall, which matched any single non-printable
 character.  there's probably some ERE class (or
 inversion thereof) which is similar, but I don't
 know it off-hand.  ‘[^[:print:]]’ maybe?   a very
 trivial test suggests that considers HTAB to match,
 which is annoying but easily fixed: ‘[^[:print:]_]’
 (where ‘_’ is a literal tab).†

cheers!
	-blf-

  †  if yer using the GNU bash(1) shell, you can
     use the (rare)  $'...'  notation to write:

        grep  -e $'[^[:print:]\t]'  ...

-- 
▶ ▶  I AM CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR A JOB!  ◀ ◀ | Brian Foster
Experienced (>25 yrs) software engineer:    |        Montpellier, FRANCE
 • Unix, Linux, embedded, design-for-test;  | Stop E$$o (ExxonMobile)!
 • Software/hardware co-design, debugging;  |     http:/www.stopesso.com
 • Kernels, drivers, filesystems, &tc;    Résumé (CV) & contact details:
 • IDL, automated testing, process, &tc.   http://www.blf.utvinternet.ie