Disappearing cron

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

The ucb cron in OSx 4.1 definitely disappeared on a regular basis. I remember
this all too well from our E-Mail/News machine getting backed up to rafters
when cron died yet again. I recall that it had something to do with cron not
protecting itself against signals, that is, cron and the tasks it started
ran in the same procress group, so that when a task signal itself or was sent
a signal, it got the shell, too. Of course, this is ancient history; so I may
be thinking of something entirely different. (OSx 4.1 has been outdated for
over three years. On a 98xe, there is no reason not to be running at least
OSx 5.0 or 5.1.)

Something to try: instead of running commands directly out of crontab, use a
C Shell script that calls the commands. C Shell always changes the process
group of commands that it runs, so if signals are the problem, then using an
intervening C Shell script should fix it.

<csg>