I am trying to auto restart smokeping every five minutes using crontab (for a specific test), but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working.
> sudo crontab -e ... #Restart smokeping every five minutes */5 * * * * service smokeping restart What am I doing wrong? There is no information on syslog.
21 Answer
The reason it is not working is that cron's default PATH is hardcoded and it looks like that:
#ifndef _PATH_DEFPATH # define _PATH_DEFPATH "/usr/bin:/bin" #endif More specifically, the service command cannot be found. If you try executing which service you will get something like: /usr/sbin/service This is why it may be helpful to explicitly set the PATH variable in your crontab.
A full crontab example follows:
# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron. # # Each task to run has to be defined through a single line # indicating with different fields when the task will be run # and what command to run for the task # # To define the time you can provide concrete values for # minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon), # and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').# # Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system # daemon's notion of time and timezones. # # Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through # email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected). # # For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts # at 5 a.m every week with: # 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/ # # For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8) # # m h dom mon dow command PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin */5 * * * * service smokeping restart 
