cron start failed

[Nikee Reddy]

Hello,

As a root, I have executed crontab -l command to see all the scheduled jobs.

Unfortunately, the system is responding with the following error message:
------------------------------------------
crontab: can't open your crontab file.
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Later, I have excuted 'ps -ef | grep cron' and there are no process related to cron.

Then I desided to start the cron process manually
/sbin/init.d/cron start

Here is the response:
------------------------------------------
!***** CRON ABORTED ********!
cannot change directory to the crontab directory
------------------------------------------

Thank you,
Nikee

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Nikee,

Looks like an error message that means something in Unix.

cd /var/spool/cron

ls -la

There needs to be something there and the cd needs to be successful.

If not, you will need to create the needed directoris as root. Perhaps look to another system for guidance.

SEP

[spex]

Hi Nikee,

In case you don't have a reference handy, this should be close to the stock directory structure of /var/spool/cron under B.11.11:

# pwd && ll -d cron && ll -R cron
/var/spool
dr-xr-xr-x 5 bin bin 96 Nov 15 2000 cron
total 16
dr-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 96 Nov 15 2000 atjobs
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 335 Nov 14 2000 crontab.root
dr-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 96 Jun 9 07:02 crontabs
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 96 Jun 29 06:30 tmp

cron/atjobs:
total 0

cron/crontabs:
total 16
-r-------- 1 root sys 674 Nov 14 2000 root

cron/tmp:
total 0

PCS