Easy crontab mistake

Posted May 7th, 2013

So I recently noticed a client’s system wasn’t running the cron jobs we had setup in crontab. Everything looked normal. Originally it was written like this:

MAILTO=frank@wiles.org
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="client.settings.dev"

0 * * * * /path/to/script.py 

Did you spot the problem? No ok good, I feel a little better. As it turns out we were not seeing and understanding the following log entry to syslog:

ERROR (Missing newline before EOF, this crontab file will be ignored)

Does that help you spot it? The MAILTO= is missing quotes around its value! *sigh* It should read:

MAILTO="frank@wiles.org"
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="client.settings.dev"

0 * * * * /path/to/script.py 

It’s an easy thing to miss and kinda embarrassed it took me ...

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Papa's got a brand new blog

Posted January 7th, 2010

So it has been written that in every geeks life they will start a blog and it will languish. And they will, with good intentions, keep meaning to update it. But they won’t. Such was the fate of my blog that used to live over on www.wiles.org. Now I’m reviving it on a sparkly fresh new domain frankwiles.com.

As it is good for the business, I will keep most of my technical writing and info up on our Revolution Systems site. So this is just personal stuff, musing, links I want to share with my friends, and all of those things I have yet to determine.

You can find out more info about me or about hobby/passion if you ...

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