Problems using 'at' and 'batch'

[James Phillips]

Hi Folks,

My 'at/batch' jobs are queueing up.

A whole bunch of 'sh' processes are created with a PPID equal to cron's PID.
Only when these shells are killed does the job get run.

Any ideas?

James Phillips

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

James,

Sounds vaguely familiar. Check this thread of mine:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x1cb03a7b3682d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

I think you may have the same situation.

Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Are these batch jobs by any chance using su - someuser command rather than su someuser command. I suspect that you are sourcing .profiles and some of the code therein expects an interactive environment - which you ain't. Commands like tset and tabs are the likely culprits. Your commands need to explicitly set and export variables (or source another file to do this) rather than relying upon .profiles.

That's my guess, Clay

[Pete Randall]

PHCO_24702 introduced behavior whereby cron(1M) may no
longer
execute at(1) jobs.

This was fixed in PHCO_27141.

Pete

[John Palmer]

Note also that cron will only allow a certain number of at/batch jobs to be running at any time. The default is 4 at and 2 batch.

See man at and man queuedefs for more information.

[James Phillips]

Thanks for all your responses...
especially Pete Randall.

I was amazed. Mid-way through the swinstall
of PHCO_27141, my at jobs were launched.
It wasn't even finished installing.

Anyway, thanks again.

James Phillips

[Pete Randall]

No problem, James. The only reason I ever found that one is because I was doing the "OK, nothing else makes sense, what changed recently?" routine and the answer came up patches.

Take care,
Pete