Package: cron Version: 3.0pl1-105 Severity: normal crontab(5) says:
BUGS Although cron requires that each entry in a crontab end in a newline character, neither the crontab command nor the cron daemon will detect this error. Instead, the crontab will appear to load normally. However, the command will never run. The best choice is to ensure that your crontab has a blank line at the end. This is madness. Some notes: 1. The first sentence doesn't make sense, as "this error" doesn't refer to anything. I suggest that in the first instance the man page could be fixed, so the second line above reads: neither the crontab command nor the cron daemon will detect when the last line does not end in a newline. Instead, 2. From looking at bug #79037, there's a patch to get cron to complain about this case. 3. I seem to be missing something here: why can't cron simply treat EOF as if it were newline? This would avoid a) having to document this problem and b) having to try to warn about it, for which bug #79037 has one patch which apparently failed and another pending. [4. Why are we still shipping cron, when fcron has been apparently capable and planned to take over from cron+anacron for years (and can already be used in place of anacron)?] -- System Information: Debian Release: 5.0.1 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages cron depends on: ii adduser 3.110 add and remove users and groups ii debianutils 2.30 Miscellaneous utilities specific t ii libc6 2.7-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libpam0g 1.0.1-5+lenny1 Pluggable Authentication Modules l ii libselinux1 2.0.65-5 SELinux shared libraries ii lsb-base 3.2-20 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip Versions of packages cron recommends: ii postfix [mail-transport-agent 2.5.5-1.1 High-performance mail transport ag Versions of packages cron suggests: pn anacron <none> (no description available) pn checksecurity <none> (no description available) ii lockfile-progs 0.1.11-0.1 Programs for locking and unlocking ii logrotate 3.7.1-5 Log rotation utility -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org