[gfxrelay]

Greetings I am trying to use cron to schedule fetchmail to download mail at a certain time. Every time I try to use cron I get this error: crond: can't lock /var/run/crond.pid, otherpid may be 2094, Resource temporarily unavailable. Does any one know how to solve this?

[lotuseclat79]

Hi gfxrelay,

What OS/version are you using? What software are you using for your emailer?

Does your emailer not provide you with a way to schedule checking your email? If it does, then that is the preferred way rather than trying to tie the email fetch mechanism into cron, i.e. fetching email is usually an internal function of the emailer, and might not necessarily be available as an external interface to a facility like cron for scheduling it to operate.

-- Tom

[tomdkat]

Are you running the command "crond" to schedule the task? If so, you should be running the "crontab" command and then schedule the task. "crontab -e" is the command you would run to add a new scheduled task.

EDIT: Also, be sure to run "crontab -e" as the user the mail fetch will run for and not as root.

Peace...

[gfxrelay]

Thanks for the reply. I am using fedora 8 with fetchmail. I can download mail but I have to run the fetchmail command manually for it to connecto to the specified pop3 server: ferchmail --fetchmail /etc/fetchmailrc. I wanted to automate this so that fetchmail downloads my e-mail every ten minutes but this is the only way I could find to do it

[lotuseclat79]

Hi gfxrelay,

Checkout F8 Fetchmail Configuration.

Note: see the paragraph entitled: Setup fetchmail and ~/.fetchmailrc which will tell you how to set up fetchmail polling with crontab.

-- Tom