cron stops running jobs

Recently we noticed that the cron jobs stopped running
on a remote machine. Stopping/starting cron didn’t help.
After a long search around we found that in /tmp there
were a lot of files of the structure C_TMP[a-z,A-Z] .
52 (=a-z, A-Z) to be precisely. They contained various error
messages of cron and were quite old.

After deleting them cron starting to run the cron jobs again.
Can it be that cron stops running jobs when it runs out of
free file names? That would be a pain for remote machines,
such like ours (any housekeeping scripts would be run by
cron wouldn’t it?) Does anybody know more about this?

Cheers,
Dorothea

The “cron” utility, though sounds simple, has lots of issues in QNX in the past. Problems like this were found before. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have just found another bug. Best to bug “Kris Warkentin” kewarken@qnx.com to look at the source code. Come back and let us know if you find anything.