error rc=127 in cron log, why?

[Cindy Wolford]

Hi Everyone,

HP UX 10.20

OK, we ran into something bizarre and I can't figure this one out. I am the only system admin, the only person with access to the prompt. Cron has not been changed in years. Actually, nothing has been changed in years (lol).

Last night, one of the cron jobs did not run and I found in the cron log rc=127 just one line past the job that did not run last night. This same job runs each night....has been running fine until last night.

I am digging around and only found a few instances of users with this error.....each time they were creating a new script and that is why they got this error.

But here, nothing has changed. Cron has not been touched, system is exact. Everything has been running fine in cron, until last night. That was our first instance of an error.

About the only thing that I can think of is that I did delete some users who were no longer active. As a hunch, I checked to ensure that these users (even though they shouldn't be) were not the owner of this cron job (the cron calls a script that runs a program)....but all user/group were at root or bin.

Anyone even have a clue where I can begin looking to figure out the what/how/why?

My thought is to just let the day go normal and check tomorrow to see if cron ran (the same cron jobs run each night)...but if it fails tomorrow then I have a real problem.

TIA
Cin

[Rick Garland · Accepted solution]

Does the file exist? The file that cron is to execute?

You mentioned some deletions, is this a possibility? Was the script changed?

What about the PATH that is within the cron script? Does the PATH still exist? (The PATH that is called by the cron script).

[Cindy Wolford]

Good questions, but everything is ok from what I can see.

Users do not have access to the prompt. They are setup so that as soon as they log in, they go directly into the database.

I did delete a few old users, that was ONLY change I made yesterday.

I can't see how deleting a user would be an issue, but to be safe I checked all of the cron scripts/programs to ensure that the userid for these scripts/programs were not by chance one of the users I had deleted. I found that all of the programs/scripts had userid = root or bin....

That was the only change made yesterday. I can't see how that would affect why this one cron job did not run. Everything else in cron ran fine. Just this one script.

As I mentioned, nothing else has been changed in months-years.

So I'm stumped.

[Pete Randall]

Cindy,

Does /var/adm/cron/log offer any further clues?


Pete

[Peter Godron]

Cindy,
can you run the script from the command line?
If a job runs from the command line but not from cron its 'normally' a problem with the environment setup.
You can trace the script with set -x at the top of the script. Has anything been changed in /etc/profile or ~/.profile ?
And finally rc=127 CAN mean process could not fork i.e. create another process.
How long has the system been up ?
Regards

[Cindy Wolford]

WOW, just found it!

I just compared our directory listing from the weekend to todays and found one of the programs WAS in fact owned by a user that I had deleted.

I'm not sure how I could have changed the ownership to this user, but I just recovered this file from tape.

Thanks everyone for the quick responses and good ideas!

[Peter Godron]

Cindy,
in future you can use the option in SAM to allocate the files of the user to be deleted to root. That way you can take your time double-checking everthing.
Good Work!
Regards