>Number:         37640
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       Incomplete man page documentation for cron
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    misc-bug-people
>State:          open
>Class:          doc-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Dec 29 10:35:00 +0000 2007
>Originator:     Randolf Richardson
>Release:        NetBSD 4.0 RC3
>Organization:
Inter-Corporate Computer & Network Services, Inc.
>Environment:
NetBSD netbsd.inter-corporate.com 4.0_RC3 NetBSD 4.0_RC3 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Oct 16 01:14:06 PDT 2007  builds@wb34:/home/builds/ab/netbsd-4-0-RC3/i386/200710160011Z-obj/home/builds/ab/netbsd-4-0-RC3/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC i386

>Description:
I still consider myself to be a slightly-better-than-novice NetBSD user, and have found the man pages to be very helpful.  In the spirit of ensuring that the man pages are complete, I have stumbled into what I think is a point in the documentation that is missing for cron:

I had to ask on IRC if there was a way to get cron to be more verbose and have that output to a log file so that I could find out what jobs it's attempting to run.  I was directed to the "/var/log/cron" log file, which helped me to determine that a job I created really was being started.

>How-To-Repeat:
Not applicable.
>Fix:
Insert the following text (or something similar) to the man page for cron as the third paragraph under the DESCRIPTION heading (the second paragraph already begins with "cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files..."):

Events such as START and FINISH are recorded in the /var/log/cron log file with date and time details.  This information is useful for a number of reasons, such as determining the amount of time required to run a particular job.  By default, root has an hourly job that rotates these log files with compression to preserve disk space.