Cron missing in Fedora 17

[BenTrein]

I need to shutdown my machine automatically at 20:00 - whether I'm home or not. So I added this line to /etc/crontab :

0 20 * * * * /sbin/shutdown -h now

This worked under F16. Then I went to restart the cron-daemon with

/etc/init.d/cron restart
-bash: /etc/init.d/cron: No such file or directory

Er what?? Where is cron hiding in F17? Quick check says indeed there's no such thing as cron in /etc/init.d. There's only 0hourly, raidcheck and smolt.

Where is cron, and if something went wrong during the installation how do I get it back? I'm assuming I could gedit the text into place, but I have no idea what it should say...

[scott32746]

Hello,

Best to just get to root
then do
# crontab -e
add your shutdown line
save it

But you could try
# systemctl restart crond.service

[BenTrein]

Yeah, that did the trick - with a test time of 11:37.
It's 11:47 and when I turn it back on, it won't stay on for more than a minute... :S Any thoughts?

[scott32746]

need more info

is it just going down or is it doing a nice shutdown ?

/etc/cron is not where you put cron jobs. I would remove anything you have added there

if you where to add manully it would be in /var/spool/cron/USER_ID

[jpollard]

There are only 5 time and date fields, your entry is showing 6.

Is that just a typo? As the sixth field is the command to run (in your case, it starts with an *...

[BenTrein]

I found that detail too (the typo) - and fixed it. I've also learnt how to use vi-editor, but man - can this not be modernised? It is sooo 1980s!

I've now typed # crontab -e

 0 18 * * * /sbin/shutdown -h now

That is supposedly the way it works. It did shut down at 18:00, but I didn't try to boot it up again till this morning - and it booted fine. I am thinking that it may have to do with the type (thank you jpollard for pointing that out).

scott: If I stick things in /var/spool/cron/USER_ID - does it still shut down? Or is it user dependent? One needs to be root to shut down even though others are logged in...

Then another thing - I'm trying to get Zenity to post a message warning of shutdown 20 minutes, and 10 minutes before shutdown. So I've created a file called /home/sd.sh and gave it chmod 755. The content of this file looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

zenity --warning \
--text="This computer will shutdown soon! Save your work."

This file works fine if I type: $ ./home/sd.sh

Then I added this through crontab -e

40,50 17 * * * /home/sd.sh

But I suspect something is wrong with that line, because it doesn't get executed... Any hints are welcome.

[jpollard]

If the user is root it works fine.

Note: shutdown has a time option that sends out timed messages already built in.

As far as the script not executing - that will likely be due to not having the full path to the file.

Note the difference between "./home/sd.sh" and "/home/sd.sh" which requires the current working directory to have a directory named "home" in it.

If this is in the root account (it should be) then it would be "/root/home/sd.sh" or "/root/sd.sh".