Thursday, July 23, 2026

Crontab changes in Linux 26.04 vs previous versions

I use a small Linux server to control the turning on and shutting off our client stations.  I use WOL to turn them on and NET RPC to shut them down. I manage them though crontab and I have been doing this since ubuntu 12.04.  This is the first time where I've had to reconfigure my scripts to make it work.

On versions of Ubuntu Linux (before 26.04) The crontab is essentially like this.

00 21 * * 1-4 $USER    $PATH/$Script.sh

So at 9:00 pm on Monday though Thursday as $User run the script located $PATH/SCRIPT.sh 

However in Ubuntu 26 it throws an error when adding the user, so once I removed the user it now looks like this.

00 21 * * 1-4 $PATH/$SCRIPT.sh

Cron throwing an error


Created a log file to catch the error.  Add >> /$PATH/$LOGFILE.log to crontab


After looking at the log it is erroring out on the user?

Once the error is resolved


Once the error was resolved the whole script ended up in the log, which is fine, so long as it works.  It is interesting the little changes that though such a big monkey wrench into a system that really hasn't changed for years.

Crontab changes in Linux 26.04 vs previous versions

I use a small Linux server to control the turning on and shutting off our client stations.  I use WOL to turn them on and NET RPC to shut th...