openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Bug: openclaw update creates duplicate cron entries — no deduplication check on re-creation

Summary

openclaw update re-creates existing cron job entries without checking for or removing existing ones. On a fleet with 14 gateways, two update events (11 May and 20 May 2026) caused Haderach's cron count to grow from 28 → 74 — a 2.6× increase — with no visible warning.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Have an OpenClaw gateway with N cron jobs configured.
2. Run openclaw update (or allow auto-update via launchd).
3. After restart, check cron job count — existing jobs are duplicated rather than updated in place.
4. Repeat for a second update event — count grows again (3× copies of each cron).

Observed Behaviour

• Each update event appends new cron entries to cron/jobs.json without removing or deduplicating existing entries with the same name/schedule/payload.
• All copies remain enabled, meaning jobs fire multiple times per schedule tick.
• Copies introduced by update events lose the original agentId binding (field becomes —/null), which changes delivery and session routing behaviour silently.
• No warning, log message, or admin alert is emitted when duplicates are created.

Expected Behaviour

openclaw update should either:

• Detect existing cron jobs with matching name+schedule+payload and update them in place (upsert), or
• Emit a clear warning listing duplicate cron IDs so operators can review and clean up manually.

Impact

• Jobs fire 2× or 3× per schedule (wasted API cost, duplicate Telegram messages, redundant transcript writes).
• Operator intervention required after every update event to audit and remove duplicates.
• Copies with missing agentId behave differently from originals — silent functional regression.
• On a multi-gateway fleet, the blast radius is multiplied across all instances.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.5.22 (a374c3a)
• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.5.0, arm64)
• Gateway count: 14
• Affected gateway: Haderach (port 18789)
• Update events observed: ~11 May 2026, ~20 May 2026

Workaround

Manual audit and disable of duplicate entries after each update. Script to identify duplicates by agentId binding (original has agent=main, update-created copies have agent=—).

Additional Context

A related pattern was also observed where certain cron payloads contained instructions that caused self-replication (the cron's own payload instructed it to add a new cron on completion). This was patched on 3 May 2026 by removing the offending instruction, but the update-triggered duplication is a separate, unpatched issue at the platform level.