Date: 04 Jul 2003 11:17:46 -0400 From: Lowell Gilbert <lowell@world.std.com> To: rdm@cfcl.com (Rich Morin), freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: format of /etc/crontab? Message-ID: <44of0a5nj9.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <p05200f42bb2a44de7749@[192.168.254.205]> References: <p05200f42bb2a44de7749@[192.168.254.205]>
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rdm@cfcl.com (Rich Morin) writes:
> The cron(8) man page (on my FreeBSD 4.7 system) says:
>
> Cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files which are named after
> accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory. Cron
> also searches for /etc/crontab which is in a different format (see
> crontab(5)).
>
> The crontab(5) man page, however, says nothing about any differences in
> the file formats. Instead, it appears to describe only the format that
> is used in /var/cron/tabs/* files.
>
> I would like to know precisely how the format of /etc/crontab differs,
> but I can't find any man page that addresses this. Help?
It does, actually:
The format of a cron command is very much the V7 standard, with a number
of upward-compatible extensions. Each line has five time and date
fields, followed by a user name (with optional ``:<group>'' and
``/<login-class>'' suffixes) if this is the system crontab file, followed
by a command.
In other words, the difference is whether there is a user name
specified just before the command to be executed
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