Michael Schumacher wrote: >> I just wonder if anyone has come across this curiosity? >> Or can suggest any possible cause. > > Did you edit one of the jobs? Some Editors (joe) create a file with an > "~" at the end as a backup. If you edit one of your cronjob-scripts > in /etc/cron.hourly/ , you may create a second file that will be run > by cron too. > This happened here some time ago and it took some time to figure out > the reason. Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't edited any of the scripts in /etc/cron.hourly . Also, I checked and found that cron.hourly starts twice before any of the scripts starts. Each of the scripts then runs twice. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland