Cron event logs says (system) NOT REGULAR... what does this mean

Thu Nov 8 21:36:00 GMT 2007

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Korn" <>
To: <cygwin>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 3:43 PM
Subject: RE: Cron event logs says (*system*) NOT REGULAR... what does this mean
| On 08 November 2007 20:28, Jerome Fong wrote:
|| > Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
| >>> On 08 November 2007 19:29, Jerome Fong wrote:
| >>> 
| >>>> I got cron working as a daemon, but now it stopped working again. I'm
| >>>> getting the following errors in the cronevents output. Anyone know what
| >>>> this means? 2007年11月08日 11:02:18 [SYSTEM] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 1644:
| >>>> (*system*) NOT REGULAR (/etc/cron.d/cron.daily)
| >> 
| >> It means that file is not a regular file.
| >> 
| >> Pierre
| >> 
| >> 
| > I (jfong) owned the file. Should (*system*) own the file? Sorry, I
| > don't understand what it means when you say it is not a regular file?
| > What makes it Not Regular?
|| Is it a symlink?
|.. or a directory
database.c- if (!S_ISREG(statbuf->st_mode)) {
database.c: log_it(fname, getpid(), "NOT REGULAR", tabname);
My advice is to forget about /etc/cron.d , at least until you get the basic stuff to work.
The files in that directory have the same format as the /etc/crontab file
and it's almost equivalent to append their contents to /etc/crontab,
(except for file specific environment variables)
The ownership rules are (in the README)
security
********
- The crontab files as well as /etc/crontab must be readable by the cron
 daemon. crontab.exe insures that by setting their group to Administrators
 (more precisely, the first in /etc/group with SID S-1-5-32-544).
- crontab.exe can be run by anyone, the cron.allow and cron.deny files
 are not used. The only way to limit the use of cron is to control
 write/modify access to /var/cron/tabs, /etc/cron.d and /etc/crontab.
- In addition the cron daemon enforces the following rules when the
 files are on a NTFS file system and CYGWIN=ntsec (or "smbntsec").
 - All crontab files as well as /etc/crontab must be writable only
 by their owner.
 - The /etc/crontab file and the files in /etc/cron.d must be owned by
 SYSTEM (more precisely the first user in /etc/passwd with SID S-1-5-18).
 - The crontab files must be owned by their respective crontab user
 or by SYSTEM.
- If you run a crontab command as SYSTEM, make sure either SYSTEM has a
 home directory in /etc/passwd or HOME is specified in the crontab.
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