Why does cron on CentOS complain about carriage returns?

Question

I have a CentOS 6 machine I am trying to run some cronjobs on and the jobs are failing complaining about a carriage return (^M) on the end of the line. Example /var/log/cron entry:

CROND[20344]: (root) CMD (/usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/bin/somescript.php >/dev/null 2>&1^M)
CROND[20213]: (root) CMD (/usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/bin/somescript.php^M)

All this works fine on CentOS 5.x, so looks like it's a CentOS 6 thing. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Use an editor that uses the correct line organisation. A quick fix is

export EDITOR=vi
crontab -e
:1,$s/^V^M//g
:wq

where ^V^M is Crtl+vCrtl+m

Answer 2

How are you editing the crontab file? Was it copied using any Windows systems, notepad, etc?

These are not UNIX linebreaks. The ^M is a hard carriage return (sometimes known as \r when using escape sequences.) Windows line endings are \r\n (Carriage return, Line Feed) while UNIX line endings are simply \n.

If you used ASCII-mode FTP, or a Windows text editor at any point to get the file contents on the new CentOS system, that's likely the issue.

Answer 3

Install dos2unix and convert it to Unix line ending:

# dos2unix /var/spool/cron/root