From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 26 15:07:46 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id PAA21132 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 26 Jun 1996 15:07:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mailhub.Stanford.EDU (mailhub.Stanford.EDU [36.21.0.128]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA21110 for ; Wed, 26 Jun 1996 15:07:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from andrsn.stanford.edu (andrsn.Stanford.EDU [36.33.0.163]) by mailhub.Stanford.EDU (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id PAA18919; Wed, 26 Jun 1996 15:07:34 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 15:07:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson To: Guy Helmer cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Message to Root Every 5 Minutes In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > /etc/crontab is not meant to be installed via crontab(1) - it is special > in two ways: it is automatically read by cron and it has a different > format than individual user crontab files. If you have used crontab(1) to > install /etc/crontab as root's crontab, you will get the message you > mentioned above each time cron tries to run one of the commands because > /etc/crontab is not in the same format as an individual user's crontab > (see the man page for crontab(5) for details of the format on an > individual user's crontab). Well, there's only one crontab binary. And /etc/crontab is in a format identical to my old /etc/crontab in 2.0.5 (this is 2.1-STABLE) except for $id in a comment line. > > So, if you make a change to /etc/crontab, *don't* use crontab(1) to put > /etc/crontab into /var/cron/tabs. If you have done this, you can use > "crontab -u root -r" to remove the installed copy (/var/cron/tabs/root) of > /etc/crontab. I'm desperate enough to try anything right now. Thanks. Annelise > > It's confusing behavior... > > Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu > >