chkcrontab 1.5

A tool to detect crontab errors

Crontab linter

chkcrontab is a script to check crontab files like those in /etc/cron.d and /etc/crontab. It tries to catch glaring errors and warn on suspect lines in a crontab file. Some valid lines will generate warnings. Certain silly yet valid crontab lines will generate errors as well.

Run this by doing:

chkcrontab crontab_file

Errors will cause a non-zero exit code. Warnings alone will not.

To see sample output for a bad crontab, run the following:

./chkcrontab ./tests/test_crontab

See the ./tests/test_crontab.disable crontab for how to disable warnings and errors.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! Please add unit tests for new features or bug fixes. To run all the unit tests run ./setup test. If you have tox installed, just run tox.

You can review coverage of added tests by running coverage run setup.py test and then running coverage report -m.

Note that tests are run on Travis for all supported python versions whenever the tree on github is pushed to.

The code is available in the following locations:

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/lyda/chkcrontab/src

• code.google: http://code.google.com/p/chkcrontab/

• Github: https://github.com/lyda/chkcrontab

• Gitorious: https://gitorious.org/uu/chkcrontab

Pull requests on any of those platforms or emailed patches are fine. Opening issues on github is easiest, but I’ll check any of them.

TODO

• Look for duplicate entries. Puppet sometimes loads up crontabs with dups.

• Check for backticks. (why?)

• Make sure MAILTO and PATH are set (perhaps others?).

• Add tests for command line.

Credits

• Kevin Lyda: Who got burned one too many times by broken crontabs.