I have a process which is run daily from cron that stops mysql, does some stuff, and starts it again. The scriput outputs a number of lines which are emailed to me in the output of the cron job. What I have noticed is that my emials actually lag by a day - it turns out that the cron job appears to not send the email until mysql is sut down the following day. I can only assume that when mysql is restarted, cron sees it as a child process, and thus does not terminate until that process does. Which happens when a new cron job shuts it down again 24 hours later. Any suggestions on fixing this ? I wouldn't have thought that stopping and starting a daemon was a particularly unusual thing to want to do from a cron job. -pete.