crond: (*system*) BAD FILE MODE Error and Solution

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I‘m getting this message in my /var/log/cron

Mar 12 09:20:01 server2 crond[1267]: (*system*) BAD FILE MODE (/etc/cron.d/vnstat)

How do I fix this problem under Fedora / CentO / RHEL or any Linux distro?

Run an ls -l on /etc/cron.d/vnstat file and find out the permissions. cron do not like files with world writable file and it is pretty picky about it. All you have to do it set 0644 (rw-r–r) permission i.e. remove world writable file permissions. Type the following command as root user:
# ls -l /etc/cron.d/vnstat
# chmod 0644 /etc/cron.d/vnstat
# ls -l /etc/cron.d/vnstat
This should fix the problem.

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

4 comment

  1. This is not the fix.
    it doesnot help if your vnstat cron file is being generated every minutes and your umask setting is not 022 .
    What if i have umask as 002 and by vnstat file is being written every min by some other process.

  2. Hi,
    my files was with rw permission, after changed the file to r only,
    cron, start worked perfectly
    Cheers for that, this has fixed my problem ;)

    Antonio Feijao

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