Cron stopped running?
 

Good day

I run rh7 and had a couple of scheduled jobs in cron. I am 3000 km away from the machine, which runs a temperamental data aqcuisition system, and would really prefer not to have to reboot unless I am on site, which I won't be for another month.

Here is the problem.

During a large backup I suspect the machine ran into memory problems, which slowed everything down dramatically. Some jobs could not finish before they had to run again.

I have killed all the "hanging" jobs I felt I could safely kill. Currently, typing ps -ef shows a couple of entries for the process name CROND and then various Automatic E-mail extraction processes. Typing ps -ef | grep cron shows only the Automatic E-mail extraction processes, not CROND.

1. Is it safe to kill CROND? What is it?

2. Is it possible to stop cron safely and then restart it without rebooting?

Many thanks
Willem

crond is the daemon that runs cron (hence the "d" ;) ). sure you can start crond manually without rebooting, just become root and start it up. man crond has some info, too. i think there's also something called "atd" that handles cron jobs that get left over, or something like that. i don't know much about it, but you might want to look into it.