vixie-cron hangs and I cannot restart it until I kill it

[magowiz]

There's a strange thing happening with my vixie-cron , sometimes it hangs, and the only way I have to restart it is to kill -s 9 cron and then /etc/init.d/vixie-cron start . Perhaps it is a problem with one of mine scripts in cron :

[Malvineous]

Presumably if you start your script with & after it it will run in the background, allowing vixie-cron to continue. My guess is that when you try to stop it, it waits until all running cronjobs have finished before exiting, and your shutdown script must wait until vixie-cron exits before returning too - hence a deadlock.

If your script runs in the background then the cronjob should complete and vixie-cron will close down when asked.

[magowiz]

I solved using another strategy, instead of stopping the whole vixie-cron, with that script I create a lock file at the beginning and I remove it at the end , I have another script that runs every 5 min but it must not be executed while the first one is running, so I simply check at the beginning of the script if the lock file exists, and if exists it immediately exits.