Question

I would like to use nnCron LITE as described in CronTabWin. The nnCron is installed as a service and works as expected.

However, I am not able to discover, how the unix command has to be transformed in order to work in the Windows/cygwin environment (e.g. for the mailnotify script).

Is there anybody who uses a cron clone for Windows? A working example of a simple unix command like (cd /path/to/twiki/bin; ./mailnotify -q) using Windows syntax would be very helpful!

Environment

-- MichaelSchmidt - 19 Jan 2005

Answer

The Windows syntax is very similar - put this in a .bat or .cmd file:

cd d:\path\to\twiki\bin
mailnotify -q 

Since it's easy to get the environment wrong, it's worth doing set >c:\temp-env.txt to check. You can also run testenv >some-file.txt from cron to if your config is OK.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Jan 2005

It sounds simple, and this is exactly what I tried before. However, the result is not what I expect.

This is the echo of the execution of the .bat file:

C:\Programme\cron>d:
D:\twiki\bin>cd \twiki\bin 
D:\twiki\bin>mailnotify -q 
D:\twiki\bin>c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat  0<"(cd /twiki/bin; ./mailnotify -q; exit)" 

Could you, please, explain the essentials of the environment settings that have to be checked? And what is required to make the testenv script work as a stand-alone tool? In my Windows installation the testenv works only, if called by the web server or from the cygwin bash. When I call the script from the Windows command line it says "command not found".

-- MichaelSchmidt - 01 Feb 2005

After making some experiments I found, that the problem is the definition of the search path within the perl environment (the actual content of the variable @INC).

Finally, I found a solution that works fine for my Windows environment: I renamed the "mailnotify" script into "mailnotify.pl", removed the shebang line and wrote the following .bat file (The programs are located on drive c: while the twiki files are located on drive d:):

d:
cd \twiki\bin
perl mailnotify.pl -q
exit

This script is ivoked by the cron clone on a regular basis and works as expected.

-- MichaelSchmidt - 03 Feb 2005

For me, this worked: I made a file "wikimailnotify.bat", with lines

cd c:\twiki\bin
c:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe -T mailnotify

-- MikkoLaakso - 13 Oct 2005