Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: Cronjob Errors

Right, with any luck, the Columbia Continuum is up and running, though it's ugly as sin right now and needs to be beat about the head with some serious CSS work.

Since a technical hitch cost me two bloody hours last night, I'm going to put the details here, but don't read 'em if it's not your thing. (I need a new entry to make sure that the update function is working.) Thanks to Adam Sampson (author of Rawdog) for helping a newbie well beyond the call of duty.

I hate the UNIX text editor known as vi. To avoid it, I'd been editing a file called cronjoblist in Homesite. Then I'd upload the file and update my crontab file (the file that schedules things to automatically update) by using the command:

crontab cronjoblist

This was enormously foolish. As Alan explains:

There are three ways of representing newline characters in text files -- \n (the Unix way), \r\n (the Windows way) and \r (the MacOS way). Since cron is expecting lines to end with \n, it's reading the \r as an extra character, and running rawdog with "-w\r" as parameters; since rawdog has no idea what \r means as an option, it's giving the odd error message you're seeing.

So, until I can find my way around this problem, it's back to vi. Damn.

And a big thanks to Adam!

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Giving The Devil His Due

Comments

you're further along than I am; I don't even know what all that Unix stuff means!

Posted by: Katherine | January 25, 2004 2:17 PM

What OS are you using again? When I run Linux (and that reminds me, I need to find a Linux mail client that implements a Baysean spam filter as nice as the one in Eudora 6 paid mode) I have a choice of text editors besides vi (or as I prefer, viLE...), all of which end lines in the accepted *nix fashion....

Posted by: Len Cleavelin | January 25, 2004 2:47 PM

Assuming you're on a Unix machine with bash, you should just do crontab -e to edit. Vi is the worst. Any text editor that requires an entire book is useless, IMHO.

Posted by: Alison | January 25, 2004 5:19 PM

Forget Unix chit-chat, what I want to know is what the internet ever did wrong to deserve so many Columbia Law student blogs?

Posted by: MattP | January 25, 2004 6:14 PM

I never liked vi either. Emacs was always my favorite, although your pinky starts to hurt after a while, it is much more powerful.

Posted by: Josh | January 25, 2004 7:31 PM