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Hi

i am using centos 5.5
i have a couple of cron jobs running, some of them take about 20min to execute, i need to check the status of this jobs running. if they are currently being executed or they finish executing.

i went on the net there is a command "jobs". can this be used ,how to use it.

please help

Hello,

Also found on the net:

Quote:

jobs -x command [ args ... ]
The first form lists the active jobs. The options have the following meanings:
-l
List process IDs in addition to the normal information.
-p
List only the process ID of the job's process group leader.
-n
Display information only about jobs that have changed status since the user was last notified of their status.
-r
Restrict output to running jobs.
-s
Restrict output to stopped jobs.
If jobspec is given, output is restricted to information about that job. The return status is 0 unless an invalid option is encountered or an invalid jobspec is supplied.

If the -x option is supplied, jobs replaces any jobspec found in command or args with the corresponding process group ID, and executes command passing it args, returning its exit status.

I never used it so cannot indicate what it does or how it exactly works. I think since it's a job launched by cron you'd better check using pidof:

Code:

pidof name_of_your_command

to see if process IDs are still used by your script/command. On the other hand you could include a line in your script that writes something to a file in /tmp when done (for example date and time). Then by checking that file you'll know if your job is completed or not.

Kind regards,

Eric

The cron daemon already logs starting jobs in /var/log/cron. So you could include a line "logger -p cron.info -t "Starting jobname $$";" near the top of the cronjob and "logger -p cron.info -t "Exiting jobname $$";" near the end. The "$$" is the PID of the cronjob shell script, so any processes it starts should have their $PPID value set to this which makes it easier to search for using 'pgrep -lP $PPID'. Another reason to favor 'pgrep' over 'pidof' is that pgrep can use wildcards so running for instance 'pgrep -l cro*' will list any process that has the string "cro" in its process name. Finally, if you don't want to or can't modify your cronjob(s) but you can edit /usr/bin/run-parts and your cronjob or jobs are part of one of the default /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} directories /etc/crontab runs you could edit /usr/bin/run-parts to include logging jobs (in kinda-like-diff style):

Code:

        if [ -x $i ]; then

+              case "${i//*\//}" in

+                      *backup*|*audit*) logger -p cron.info -t "Starting job "${i//*\//}"";;

+              esac

The only drawback is that you need to track changes as /usr/bin/run-parts will be overwritten on upgrade of the crontabs package.

Hi,

Thanks for pointing out pgrep unSpawn, yet learned something new :-)

Kind regards,

Eric