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Show currently running cron jobs

harmlessCrondebian, ubuntu
user@server
ps -eo pid,user,etime,cmd --forest | grep -A3 '[C]RON'

For each job it starts, the cron service forks a child process named CRON, with the shell and the actual command below it. The tree view shows this chain with user and elapsed time (ELAPSED). A job running for several hours that should take minutes is probably hanging.

Note: The square brackets in the pattern prevent grep from matching itself. The main daemon appears as /usr/sbin/cron -f in lowercase and is therefore not matched.

Open question before approval: Prüfen, ob die von cron geforkten Kindprozesse auf Debian 12 in ps tatsächlich als /usr/sbin/CRON -f erscheinen und -A3 bei verschachtelten Jobs genug Zeilen zeigt.

Also searched as

  • is the cron job still running
  • hanging cron job
  • which cron jobs are running now
  • cron job running for hours

Related one-liners

All in Cron

Count running Apache processes

$ps -C apache2 --no-headers | wc -l
harmlessApache

Show running lsphp processes with memory usage

$ps -eo pid,user,%cpu,rss,etime,cmd --sort=-rss | grep -E "[l]sphp"
harmlessLiteSpeed

Check which scripts in cron.daily actually run

$run-parts --test /etc/cron.daily
harmlessCron

Find out which cron job runs a command

#grep -rn "wp-cron.php" /etc/crontab /etc/cron.d /etc/cron.hourly /etc/cron.daily /etc/cron.weekly /etc/cron.monthly /var/spool/cron/crontabs 2>/dev/null
harmlessCron

Prevent overlapping cron jobs with flock

$flock -n /tmp/backup.lock /usr/local/bin/backup.sh
harmlessCron

Run all scripts in cron.daily right now

#run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily
cautionCron

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