Arch Linux

pauper

Member

Registered: 2012-06-25

Posts: 38

incron 0.5.12 issues

Since upgrading to the latest version of incron it has been behaving unpredictably. I have had the incrond daemon crash a number of times, unpredictable execution of scripts and zombie processes left behind by incrond.

It seems there have been a number of syntax changes since the abandoned code was picked up again on github, though documentation seems to be scarce. One problem was that 0.5.12 implemented recursive directory monitoring by default (recursive=false needs to be added to the comma separated inotify arguments given after the folder in the incrontab table to disable it) - this may have been the cause of the daemon crashing originally but I haven't done enough testing to be sure.  After downgrading to 0.5.10-8 I discovered one of the other changes was from space separated arguments in the incrontab tables to tab separated.

The other main problem I was having was that incron was recognising file system changes in the monitored folder but failing to execute the script even though it reported that it had done so in the incrond logs:

May 11 14:10:04 SERVER incrond[28223]: (user) CMD (/home/user/bin/test.sh /home/user/incoming/test (0))

From testing I have discovered that this occurs when certain characters are present in the detected file changes (certainly round brackets () consistently cause this behaviour).

Downgrading and reverting back to the old incrontab syntax seems to have fixed things for now, I was looking at using systemd path but I need to pass the changed file/folder name as an argument to my script and it seems this is not possible.

Is there anyone else who has seen similar behaviour or managed to find a workaround?

Last edited by pauper (2016-05-11 19:35:20)

ArchUser90

Member

Registered: 2016-05-18

Posts: 1

Re: incron 0.5.12 issues

Thanks. I have had the same issue. I've made a downgrade. Version 10-8 works fine.