4.5 Exit codes

The following are the status codes returned to the operating system when the program terminates.

0

No problems.

1

An attempt has been made to start cron but there is already a /var/run/cron.pid file. If there really is no other cron daemon running (this does not include invokations of mcron) then you should remove this file before attempting to run cron.

2

In parsing a guile configuration file, a job command has been seen but the second argument is neither a procedure, list or string. This argument is the job’s action, and needs to be specified in one of these forms.

3

In parsing a guile configuration file, a job command has been seen but the first argument is neither a procedure, list or string. This argument is the job’s next-time specification, and needs to be specified in one of these forms.

4

An attempt to run cron has been made by a user who does not have permission to access the crontabs in /var/cron/tabs. These files should be readable only by root, and the cron daemon must be run as root.

5

An attempt to run mcron has been made, but there are no jobs to schedule!

6

The system administrator has blocked this user from using crontab with the files /var/cron/allow and /var/cron/deny.

7

Crontab has been run with more than one of the arguments -l, -r, -e. These are mutually exclusive options.

8

Crontab has been run with the -u option by a user other than root. Only root is allowed to use this option.

9

An invalid Vixie-style time specification has been supplied.

10

An invalid Vixie-style job specification has been supplied.

11

A bad line has been seen in /etc/crontab.

12

The last component of the name of the program was not one of mcron, cron, crond or crontab.

13

Either none of the user’s configuration directories exist, or there is a problem reading the files there. The configuration directories are ~/.cron and the directory pointed to by the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable, or ~/.config/cron if this is not set.

15

Crontab has been run without any arguments at all. There is no default behaviour in this case.

16

Cron has been run by a user other than root.