Bug#1104759: crontab(5) man page contains incorrect ranges and language
From
Andrew Wood@21:1/5 to
All on Mon May 5 21:40:01 2025
Package: cron
Version: 3.0pl1-196
Severity: minor
Dear Maintainer,
The crontab(5) manual contains a table near the start, listing the allowed values for each field.
It lists the "day of month" field as allowing 0-31, and the "month" field as allowing 0-12. In both cases the range should start at 1, not 0. Values of
0 for either field are not accepted by crontab(1).
The manual states that ranges or lists of names are not allowed, but
crontab(1) allows lists and ranges of names for both the month and the day
of the week, so for instance "Jan-Mar" is accepted in the month field, and "Mon,Tue,Wed" is accepted in the day-of-week field.
When the month or the day of the week are given as names rather than
numbers, the manual does not explicitly state whether these must always be
in English, or whether the language depends on any locale settings.
-- Package-specific info:
--- EDITOR:
--- /usr/bin/editor:
/usr/bin/editor
--- /usr/bin/crontab:
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root crontab 51936 Apr 6 18:47 /usr/bin/crontab
--- /var/spool/cron:
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /var/spool/cron
--- /var/spool/cron/crontabs:
drwx-wx--T 2 root crontab 4096 Apr 6 18:47 /var/spool/cron/crontabs
--- /etc/cron.d:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /etc/cron.d
--- /etc/cron.daily:
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /etc/cron.daily
--- /etc/cron.hourly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /etc/cron.hourly
--- /etc/cron.monthly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /etc/cron.monthly
--- /etc/cron.weekly:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 5 19:02 /etc/cron.weekly
-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-34-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh