What's it all about, Alfie?

I learned a new thing - at least it appears to be new, about crontabs on Solaris 8 - maybe later versions as well. It seems that if you have blank lines in a crontab it's going to give you errors. This is news to me for I've had a crontab on a Solaris 8 box for about 4 years that has blank lines in it and it's working fine. But today I had to update my crontab on my main Solaris development box and it was giving me fits about an illegal end of line.

I tried a ton of things, finally I dug into the man pages on the Solaris box and it said right there that blank lines should be avoided. Odd. I looked at another Solaris box and it's crontab has blank lines and it's working fine. But sure enough, take the blank lines out of the crontab and it's working fine.

Odd... but at least I know what to avoid on Solaris.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 6:47 am and is filed under Coding, Vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.