chkcrontab
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 packaged version is available via pip or easy_install
as chkcrontab. The project page is on pypi:
The source code is available in the following locations:
Pull requests on any of those platforms or emailed patches are fine. Opening issues on gitlab or github is easiest, but I'll check any of them.
Packaging
For rpm distributions, ./setup.py bdist --formats=rpm should make an
rpm but currently dies due to not finding the chkcrontab.1 man page.
For Debian distributions there's an additional tool that might work.
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.
- Make "acceptable filenames" a configurable thing: lyda#4
- Packaging: lyda#13
Credits
- Kevin Lyda: Who got burned one too many times by broken crontabs.