By ejb on

I have Open Atrium installed in a folder of a client's website. I've had no problems installing or using it. But... I tried to FTP into my host the other day, and I could not see my public_html folder because I had 175,000 cron.php files that had built up for a period of several months.

I noticed in Open Atrium under reports, that the cron is running every minute. After it completes, then it creates a new cron.php file in the root of my website (i.e.: cron.php.1, cron.php.2, cron.php.175000 etc.)

I've read through the forums, and I've seen a core hack that stops it from logging the "Cron run completed" message. But I don't know how to make it stop creating these cron.php files. Or maybe there's a way to get them to auto-delete.

It's kind of out of control.

Any thoughts or sugestions?

Thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Your problem is outside Drupal.

Drupal doesn't create those files and doesn't run cron. It expects you to set up an external process that fetches its special cron URL. You have such a process; it's just not configured quite right.

If you have "cron.php.1, cron.php.2, cron.php.175000 etc." in your directory, they're being created by wget, or curl, or lynx, or whatever you have installed in your system's crontab to trigger Drupal's cron script.

Unix crontab examples from the Drupal documentation at http://drupal.org/cron: 

45 * * * *  /usr/bin/lynx -source http://example.com/cron.php
45 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.example.com/cron.php
45 * * * * curl --silent --compressed http://example.com/cron.php

I recommend wget. If it's set up as shown in the documentation, it will NOT create any files. The "-O -" sends any output to stdout, which cron may email to your account if it contains anything.

gollyg’s picture

gollyg commented

yelvington got it right.

more information http://serverfault.com/questions/116047/cron-job-creating-empty-file-eac...