Question

So, I have a CRON job that is simply not working.
For a while (about 5 hours), there was an error in the script myapp.py, because of a password change.

During this time, CRON (understandably) spammed my inbox to death with the same failure notice about 300 times.
So, I fixed the script and turned the CRON job off (read: commented it out) for a few hours, so that it could finish sending out any unsent emails and generally cool off.
However, about 8 hours later, I find that it spammed me another 200-300 emails, and didn’t actually stop running when I killed it.
So I deleted all of those emails and uncommented the CRON job, hoping that it would run properly, now that I fixed the script.

Now, however, it doesn’t seem to be running at all. No emails are coming in, and nothing is being processed. My hosting provider did a quick check on CRON, and found that other jobs worked without issues.

Here is the crontab I’ve been operating with:

# canary
MAILTO="[e-mail]"
*/1 * * * * /var/chroot/home/content/11/1234567/html/cron/app/myapp.py

The python script begins with:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

which is the path returned by “which python” for the environment. The script has also been chmoded with +x, and runs (correctly) when called (i.e. ./myapp.py)

Answer 1

I fixed the issue. For whatever reason, my hosting service requires the command to be wrapped in quotes.

# canary
MAILTO="[e-mail]"
# 1 myapp
* * * * * "$HOME/html/cron/app/myapp.py"