Configure log file for cron daemon on AIX

Cron daemon log in by default on /var/adm/cron/log, but I wanted to put it with all other logs of the system.
All system logs (syslog, mksysb, ftp, http, and so on, are on /var/syslog filesystem, I decided to put cron logs in the same place. Here’s what I did.

Add this lines to the end of file /etc/cronlog.conf

logfile=/var/syslog/cron.log
size=2m
rotate=4
archive=/var/syslog
compress

As cron is started from inittab it will respawn when you kill the PID.

[root@aix:/] cat /etc/inittab|grep cron
cron:23456789:respawn:/usr/sbin/cron

So, just kill cron’s PID (10748102 in this case)

[root@aix:/var/adm/cron] ps -ef|grep cron
    root 10748102        1   0 18:35:42      -  0:00 /usr/sbin/cron

Note also that cron log wil be rotate and compress. See:

[root@bibmnim:/var/adm/cron] ls -ltr /var/syslog/
total 18752
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     system          256 Mar 01 2011  lost+found
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     cron         164711 Apr 21 23:58 cron.log.0.Z
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     cron         165926 Apr 27 12:29 cron.log.1.Z
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     cron         165527 May 03 01:01 cron.log.2.Z
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     cron         164224 May 08 13:45 cron.log.3.Z
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     cron           1493 May 13 18:41 cron.log

That’s it!

Just thanks if the post was helpful