openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Bug: systemEvent+sessionTarget:main cron jobs report ok but never execute shell commands

Description

systemEvent cron jobs with sessionTarget: "main" and wakeMode: "now" are scheduled correctly and show status "ok" with "ran X hours ago" — but the shell command in payload.text is never actually executed because there is no active main agent session.

The gateway reports success but the script never runs. This is a silent failure.

Impact

3 production cron jobs appeared to run successfully for 12 days but never executed:

• tango-events-daily — node tango-daily.js (daily tango event report)
• daily-spend-summary — node daily-spend-summary.js (AI spend)
• meta-pixel-enrichment-reminder — notification command (Meta pixel deadline)

Same pattern as daily-update-research and jarvice-qa-daily which were moved to system crontab on May 16 by someone who hit the same wall but did not report it.

Root cause

src/cron/service/timer.ts — executeMainSessionCronJob(): the systemEvent is dispatched to a main agent session. If no main session is active, the event is silently dropped. Gateway marks the job as ok anyway.

Expected behavior

• If a session is required for execution and none exists, the job should report "skipped" or "failed" with a clear reason, not "ok"
• Optionally: create a short-lived session to execute the systemEvent command

Workaround

Move shell-command cron jobs to the system crontab (crontab -e). Gateway cron only works reliably for agentTurn jobs that need AI agent processing.