Ghost Cron

[Chen Yingjie]

We received an error message which sent to "root".
It shows an deleted ID's cron is still actived. but we checked the cron files and not find such cron file.

How can I solve this problem?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suspect that you merely deleted the crontab files w/o actually re-running cron (via the crontab command). Do a crontab -u user -l and see if any cron commands are actually resident.

[Muthukumar_5]

what is there in ls /var/spool/cron directory? List crontab jobs with crontab -l -u command.
It will show the related files which involved.

--
Muthu

[F Verschuren]

is there still a cron file?
ll /var/spool/cron/crontabs/

to remove (I heart this is working but never seen the problem)

recreate the user, (asme ID)
su to new user
crontab -r
exit
userdell new user

[Tor-Arne Nostdal]

Have the system been restarted after the user was deleted ?
If so check directories cron is using (see previous posts and/or man cron).
Also check atjobs.

If system haven't been restarted try restart cron itself. This should remove the error.

/sbin/init.d/cron stop ; /sbin/init.d/cron start

The problem could be that the crontab (stored in file) for the user was not deleted along with the userdel if the cron process held the files. Similare to deleted files which still occupy space on a disk until the process(s) holding the files is stopped.

/Tor-Arne