multiple instances using cron

[Matthew Healey]

Hi all,

I have searched high and low on the web and this mailing list and 
cannot find anything similar to the problems I am seeing.

I have the following two commands set up in cron (as root) to run at 
midnight (under MacOS X Server 10.2.6).

rsync -av --progress --delete --progress --size-only 
rsync.nic.funet.fi::CPAN /Volumes/mirrors/mirrors/cpan
rsync -av --progress --delete --progress --size-only 
ftp.macgamefiles.com::macgamefiles-ftp 
/Volumes/mirrors/mirrors/macgamefiles

Individually these commands work fine, but when I run them under cron, 
they seem to get executed over and over until the server dies. Each 
time the process runs, it opens yet another connection to the remote 
server.

I was wondering if there is any problem with running two instances of 
rsync at the same time, or if their is something going wrong that makes 
cron think that the process hasn't started, and thus tries again...

I have tried putting the commands into a shell script to force them to 
execute one after the other, rather than at the same time but that 
doesn't seem to fix it either..

I can't seem to find anything relevant with google as I don't think I 
am explaining myself correctly, or using the correct terminology.

Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

- Matt