Continuous crontab comment addition about whenever HOT 11 CLOSED

Those comments definitely weren't written by Whenever. Whenever calls the unix command crontab to actually write the crontab file so perhaps it is to blame. If you find that there's a way to avoid this with the crontab command, let me know.

What OS are you running?

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Gentoo 4.1.2

I figured it was a cron thing, but was hoping you had seen it before. Google did not yield anything helpful as far as turning it off. We probably just need to fork and remove the first three lines of the file every time.

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We are having the same issue and I think I figured out what is going on. To rebuild the crontab, whenever is performing and crontab -l command and then doing a replace on the contents. On our server, OpenSuse 11.2, crontab -l includes these comments at the top, but when you edit the crontab these comments do not appear in the editor. Cron must take the complete contents of the submitted crontab and insert the comments at the top when you save. Since whenever, unknowingly, keeps the comments in the crontab it submits and cron saves the file and appends newer comments on as usual.

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pallan, do you commented lines look the same (or similar) to br's above? If so I could regex them out.

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yes they do, i am looking at the code right now. I started to add an additional command line options, -C, to allow the user to tell whenever to strip them out. It appears to be distro specific so I didn't think a global replace was the best idea.

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maybe a --cut # option to tell whenever how many lines to chop off the top?

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Sounds good, I will see that I can do.

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I added a commit to my fork, but don't have tests yet if you want to take a look http://github.com/pallan/whenever/commit/9157c270282a33de16140806b6d665bfac4bef15

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Finally got a chance to get back and look at this, and having a heck of a time getting a test in place for it. Since the "cutting" of the crontab happens in the read_crontab method, and that method is usually mocked to stop the command line execution I can't get a clean test implemented. Any suggestions? Commit has moved here http://github.com/pallan/whenever/commit/29910fd6ba0d1e8e89797993b6b15e9c87682492

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How about just a test or two for your #prepare method? Just make sure it cuts off lines from the top like you expect.

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Did it. Always get ansy when adding a test that calls a protected/private method directly, but it made sense once you take into account how you initialize the command. I sent a pull request for you also. Thanks!

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