Anybody knows what this is? I got it in the cron log file ...

Parent dies, child lives on.

In this case ORPHAN has nothing to do with processes!!!

I am also getting this weird error, however I checked passwd/shadow files and those users don't exist anymore. I also deleted their entries in /var/spool/cron/<user>. Any other ideas how to get rid of these?

Restart crond, and if you use nscd, after passwd account modifications?

This thread is really old but is in top5 of google hits so...

This will occur if there's a file in the /var/spool/cron directory
that doesn't match up to a username and UID. So if you find /var/spool/cron/bob --you must be able to 'id bob' I found this as a result of creating a backup file for root /var/spool/cron/root.20100324 (today's date). Since there is no UID for user "root.20100324' then it's considered ORPHAN.

Make sense? Here's the code --this conditional has probably not changed for years...

if (strcmp(fname, "*system*") && !(pw = getpwnam(uname))) {
/* file doesn't have a user in passwd file.
*/
log_it(fname, getpid(), "ORPHAN", "no passwd entry");
goto next_crontab;
}

The other dead giveaway is when you do an ls in the dir and it shows a uid instead of a username. ls automatically grabs the username from /etc/passwd (or wherever eg ldap) if it exists.

On our centos systems, we had to restart nscd, restart cron, (in that order). Cron needs needs it's own entry to check it's self to see if it's
lost contact with the ldap server.

Allen Rueter