hello everyone I have a slight problem. I'm trying to set up cron to create a sheduled task to reboot my linux server every night (not my idea, I've just got to do what the office tells me to do) anyways, I've got a crontabe file created that should reboot the system at (insert time) every day but it doesn't seem to initiate the crontab file. do I have to do anything to initialize cron? un comment a config file or something? i'm not sure myself being that this is the first time I've used crontab. any help would be appreicated
wormraper

use the command:

crontab -e

to edit the file. that should open up a vi editor with the cron file. When you close it, it should automatically update cron. You will need to be root (so you can reboot) otherwise it edits the crontab file for your user.

If this is how you did it then I am not sure. This is how I edit mine.

PhilD

yeah, I've done that too. and it seems to go fine until it executes the reboot file. I can execute the reboot file manually so I know it's not a problem with the file. cron just doesn't seem to want to freakin execute it.
wormrapre

I noticed with one of my scripts that cron doesn't have the same environment as the user. I think this is true even for root. Try puting in the full path to "reboot" or "shutdown" in your script. (either in cron or your write script that cron calls) See if that doesn't help!

PhilD

I finally got it. I put the full shutdown command in cron
thanks guys