Yikes, the formatting came out really badly here, Anyway, I rewrote the instructions here. It has since gotten much easier to install these things since i wrote this page originally. checkout the page here.
November 30, 2006
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Thanks for the info on getting this to work. However I found 2 things.
1) I had to run the ‘mkpasswd’ cmd to add my username to /etc/passwd _before_ running the cygrunsrv commands.
2) I had to change my HOME directory from /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings\username to /cygdrive/c/cygdrivehome/username. It must be the spaces in original HOME path that caused cron to fail to run username’s cron. I did this simply by manually editing the relevant field in /etc/passwd .
Comment by Anonymous — June 20, 2007 @ 6:20 am
thanx!!! for this info. 🙂
Comment by fur — September 2, 2007 @ 1:48 am
The Crontab syntax is:
(min) (hour) (day of month) (month) (day of week)
It does not have a “year” field, as you said.
Thanks for the HOWTO
Comment by Morves — September 6, 2007 @ 9:56 am
I had a lot of difficulty getting cron to run along side sshd. I’ve now sussed it.
Both services (“CYGWIN cron” and “CYGWIN sshd” need to own /var/empty with exclusive write access (no writeable permissions on the group). That means they need to run as the same user.
I needed to set the sshd_server user’s password as it had some default password that I didn’t know:
passwd sshd_server
then I changed the “CYGWIN sshd” Windows service to login with the new password. (restart service). Then I setup the cron service using the instructions above where USER = sshd_server.
Now cron is running, all users’ crontabs are being executed.
[aside – Andrew, thank you for taking the time to write this excellent explanation!]
Comment by Alex — October 27, 2007 @ 1:16 pm