I need to run a very large crontab file. Everything is set up but I noticed some of the jobs were being ignored. I figured out everything on line 256 and over is ignored. crontab -l lists all the lines, but they are still ignored. Man page (FC2) didn't say anything abouit it.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Are some of the commands run at the same time?

Maybe you could make them into one script that cron calls.

I can't imagine needing more than 256 cron entries. I don't know if there is a limit... but there might be. I'd look for a work around.

What kind of stuff are you running that you need 256+ entries!!!?

I would love a workaround...
The computer is running a set of 10 temperature controllers over a network. Each temp controller has it's own theremal regime that simulates a diel cycle, so that setpoints have to be updated every 10 minutes. If you do the math thats 10 controlers * 6 updates per hour * 24 hours a day. Becasue each treatment is a little different there isn't any redundancy (this is a biology lab if you hadn't figured it out). Finally, to make it worse, some of the treatments have to fluctuate randomly (ie. today it will fluctutate from 27-31C, tomorrow it may fluctuate from 26-32C).
Here is what I did:
-The controllers are networked, so I wrote a script that takes the new temperature and an ip address as arguments and changes the setpoint.
-The cron script has a line for each change in temp for all controllers
-There are multiple versions of the cron script (representing possible "random" regimes) and each day at midnight a new random thermal regime is picked.

Everything works fine except the lower portions of the cron list are being ignored.

I really like using the cron becuase it's easy to work with. I could probably alter the existing script (perl) to do the math of figuring out the proper temps based on time and some other variables but I was hoping for an easier fix.

Thanks in advance

Do you hit all 10 at the same time? Could you?

You could then put all 10 in a file with whatever temps they need. Basically the 10 commands you would be giving in the crontab.

You would then have 144 lines... calling scripts. You can then have different crontabs call preselected different scripts.

Basically... seperate out everything by sets of 10 and run them as scripts... or is that not going to work. The scripts can call scripts... that's okay.

Would that work?

BTW: I did a search and wasn't able to find any practical reason it was limited at 256 entries... but assuming that is the problem we should be able to find a way around it.

Yes, that will work but it would be a little clunky. I would have to figure out a way to do the random variation treatments...maybe in a separate set of files.

The way I would do it would be:

set001/script001.sh
set001/script002.sh
set001/script003.sh
...etc...
set002/script001.sh
set003/script002.sh
...etc...
setNNN/script001.sh

and so on.

Just sort out all the lines which run at a same time into each script and put the in a directory... one for each special crontab. If you already have the jobs running 10 at a time then this could be done with a few commands... and wouldn't be very hard.

Then all you have to do is Make a crontab with:
[time information] /pathto/set001/script001.sh
[time information] /pathto/set001/script002.sh

Then make as many copies as you have sets... and change that one directory for each different crontab so it uses a different set... with vi it would take two seconds (:g/set001/s//set002/) for each script. Then you can use the same thing to change between the master crontabs randomly at night.

Edit: This would make it pretty easy to add sets if you wanted... at least I think so.

Thanks, I got a fairly good fix. I put all the temperatures for a controller in a text file in the order they are called. The script checks the time and then knows where in the list of temperatures it needs to get it's new setpoint. Changing a treatment (or the random variability) is only a matter of altering the lists of temps in the text files. My crontab is only a few lines this way and everything is easy to manage.
Still, seems that crontabs are limited in size, at least in this distro.