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For a couple of days now, I'm having shutdown problem in my Ubuntu 20.10 system. Whenever I hit the power Off systemd informs in a moment, Waiting for process: crond. After doing some research and reading several manual pages about cron, crontab, anacron etc. I've found the root cause of the problem i.e /etc/cron/collect:-

*/10 * * * * root /var/tmp/crond

invoking journalctl confirms this which had multiple occurrence of (root) CMD (/var/tmp/crond). I've searched a lot on the internet to know if crond was some crucial part of the system and what I understood was that it wasn't crucial. but I wanted to be sure, so I searched everything in system to find a file, which is /run/crond.pid which have pid of cron in it, not of the process crond or specifically of the file /var/tmp/crond and To be more certain I've installed ubuntu on gnome-disks and as expected everything I discovered was that there was no collect job and there is no crond file in /var/tmp directory and after all why would anyone sane place a crucial system file in a directory which indicates that it is temporary. But yeah I really don't want to mess up my system and so I'm here to hear that it is safe to delete /etc/cron.d/collect and /var/tmp/crond. So what do you say?

in response to a comment: /var/tmp/crond is a binary executable

Pablo Bianchi
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Shibasish
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1 Answers1

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Same problem on Xubuntu 20.04 since 2 weeks. My system hangs after having displayed :

 Reached target Reboot.
 systemd-shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: crond

After searching across cron jobs files using this command :

find /etc/cron* -type f | xargs  ls -ltr

I found 2 potential "culprits" (both have a recent update date):

/etc/cron.daily/google-chrome
/etc/cron.d/collect

In order to disable them, I moved these files elsewhere (in my home directory) and restarted twice to check.

Great! I recovered the fast shutdown!

PS: The file /etc/cron.daily/google-chrome is a script that does not look so bad. But the file /etc/cron.d/collect schedules a weird binary named /var/tmp/crond that is not documented.

This post gave me the way.

Gilles Gaido
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  • I had the same issue exactly with Kubuntu 20.04 after the installation of some packages and updates. It was took about 100 seconds to shutdown in comparison with about 6 seconds only according to the Plymouth splash theme counter. I found the `collect` task too, and after moving it away from the `/etc/cron.d` everything returned to be fine again. – SaidbakR May 06 '21 at 22:38
  • Same here. Does anyone know what that collect file does? No problems after moving it. – treyiii Nov 12 '21 at 22:42