Can't *really* understand cron behavior
 

Here is my trouble:

cron is launched with /usr/sbin/crond -l8 >>/var/log/cron 2>&1,
as Dillon says in his doc files.
I've a slackware 8.0 and i'm trying to test dillon's cron with:

crontab -e

* * * * * date >>/tmp/test
* * * * * date

:wq

I'm sure crond is running and accepting updates. In fact when I write ':wq' in crontab's vi the following happens:

1) /var/spool/cron/crontabs/cron.update is touched and contains 'root'
2) an empty /etc/crontab is touched
3) after a minute the two files are deleted

these things make me think cron is updating its jobs.
*But*
After all this:

1) /var/log/cron is empty (totally)
2) /tmp/test simply doesn't exists
3) this situation keeps itself inaltered in time

I really can't understand what's going on. Any hint would be *greatly* appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

Max.

Is there an env variable $EDITOR? if so what its value? Another thing, what distribution is it? I remember there were questions about slack's interpretation of crontab and vi, if vi symlinked to elvis everuything works out, if it is an editor by itself strange things happen, I was able to fix them by explicitely exporting EDITOR variable set to vi
export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi

I've tried as you said but it behaves exactly as before... SIGH.

neo,

I've checked your suggestion and found that everything is exactly as you say. Then I've changed the commands i put in crontab -e and amazingly it started to work.
I can only guess that for some reason unknown to me, the commands i formerly put in crontab -e did fail silently.

But as far as today crond keeps working, still I think its behavior is *strange*, considering that i had launched the daemon with debug level 0 but nevertheless it didn't log anything. Isn't it a lack of application performance?

Thankyou for your attention.
Max.