PeterSmith.org | Starting cron under wsl2

Starting cron under wsl2

There are a lot of "recipes" out there for how to start cron under wsl when a Windows PC starts up. I won't bore you with why I wanted to do that. Suffice to say, the recipes didn't work for me. But eventually, I found a way.

The recipes have two parts to them. First set things up so any user under WSL can start the cron service. This means editing /etc/sudoers and adding a line like:

%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service cron start

The second step revolves around setting up a task in Window's taskmgr to run on system boot up. This task wouldn't work for me … it would run and fail. The recipes set things up to lauch the following command.

  C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /usr/sbin/service cron start

But that produced an error for me. E.g.,

  C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /usr/sbin/service cron start

  Starting periodic command scheduler: croncron: can't open or create /var/run/crond.pid: Permission denied failed!

What I found was that I needed to explicitly use the sudo command to start the service command. Changing the taskmgr job to the following resulted in success. Yay!

  C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/service cron start