Script cron: list failed command

Hi List!

Just wanted to let you know that I scratched an itch I had with the 
'cron' script of lowatch.
I did not like it that I had to look up in the logfiles what the problem 
was every time I saw something like 'grandchild #15555 failed with exit 
status 1: 1 Time(s)' in the summary generated by logwatch.

So I took a look at /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/cron as 
provided by Debian Squeeze (7.3.6.cvs20090906-1squeeze1), and modified 
it as follows (diff output):
120a121
 > %ExecutedCommand = ();
142,143c143,144
<       ($ThisLine =~ s/^([^ ]+) \([^ ]+\)\s+//) or
<       ($ThisLine =~ 
s/^\S+\s+\S+\s+..:..:..\s+\S+\s+\S+\[\d+\]:\s+\((\S+)\)\s+//)
---
 >       #($ThisLine =~ s/^([^ ]+) \([^ ]+\)\s+//) or
 >       ($ThisLine =~ 
s/^\S+\s+\S+\s+..:..:..\s+\S+\s+\S+\[(\d+)\]:\s+\((\S+)\)\s+//)
145c146,147
<       $User = $1;
---
 >       $PID  = $1;
 >       $User = $2;
148a151
 >          $ExecutedCommand{$PID} = {command=>$ThisLine, user=>$User};
177a181,183
 >          if ($Reason =~ /^grandchild #(\d+) failed with exit status 
(\d+)/ && $ExecutedCommand{$1}) {
 >              $Reason = $ExecutedCommand{$1}{user}.": failed command 
(EC ".$2."): ".$ExecutedCommand{$1}{command};
 >          }

I have commented out the other style of logfile formatting since I don't 
use it and because of that, would not know where it tells the PID.

This changes the output in the logwatch summery to something like:

Errors when running cron:
     marko: failed command (EC 1): cd; ./compareCashAccounts.sh | grep 
f: 7 Time(s)

Which helps me a lot more than the PID of the failed process (if I need 
that, I am still free to look through the log file myself). And the 
output is shorter besides :-) (in the old style, that would be 7 lines 
of errors...).

Just in case anyone else is interested in the improvement.

Kind regards,

Martin Gerdes

DSER


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