Revisiting cron -- Re: crontab

Robert Moskowitz rgm at htt-consult.com
Thu Nov 18 14:35:16 UTC 2010



On 10/09/2010 03:25 PM, Steven Stern wrote:
> On 10/09/2010 12:37 PM, Patrick Dupre wrote:
>    
>> Before (fedora 10) the default file /etc/crontab was not empty.
>> On my new fedora13 it is just almost empty.
>> So I guess that the cron files are never run and there is probably a
>> tool to manage it.
>> Could you guide me ?
> Individual cron files are in /var/spool/cron
>
> /etc/crontab doesn't do anything.

Then why is it still there, leading one to think they can edit it for 
global cron jobs?

Shouldn't it have some text in it like:

# This file is now dead. It is only here for historical purposes.
# Either use anacron or user crontabs.

Or some such?

I am getting ready to FINALLY really do something with cron, and I 
wanted to use /etc/crontab rather than root's crontab. And reading docs, 
some refer to a line needed in this file as the user that the command 
runs under, yet the comments in the file do not include a user field. 
That got me back to this list, and before asking, I did a search and 
found this thread. One frustrating thing is that if you use "crontab -e" 
you have no direct guidance as to the fields (no comment lines put there 
by default).

Also is EMAIL by default to the user (in my case root) unless you have 
"MAILTO=" ?



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