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Date:      Wed, 21 Apr 1999 16:26:58 +0200
From:      Stefano Riva <sriva@alice.it>
To:        Rudi Opperman <rudi@askas.co.za>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: help with cron and crontab mail messages
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19990421162658.00a518f0@relay.alice.it>
In-Reply-To: <371DD21A.F413A3F7@askas.co.za>
References:  <3.0.5.32.19990421150955.00aa1550@relay.alice.it>

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At 15.26 21/04/99 +0200, you wrote:
>> /etc/crontab it's in a slightly different format than users' crontab.
>> Actually, it's the "main" system crontab table. 
>If it is not a user's crontab then whose is it ?  (All the jobs are
>owned by root ?)

  In /etc/crontab there's one more column between wday and command: who.
Put there the user you want. cron will run the specified command as that
user. You'll notice that for all commands in the default FreeBSD's
/etc/crontab, who == root, but this is not mandatory.

>>   What do you mean with "I added the jobs to /etc/crontab and loaded it"?
>I meant as root that i ran "contab -u root /etc/crontab" on the modified
>crontab file ...

  Ah. You "dubbed" it. BTW, if you want to use users' crontabs you may edit
them even without specifying a filename: "crontab -u johndoe -e" will edit
johndoe's crontab. If necessary the spool file will be created having a
unique name and it'll be in /var/cron/tabs. Don't modify spool files by
hand. Use always crontab -e.

>> You don't have to load anything. If cron is running normally, it checks
>> every minute the modtime of /etc/crontab and, if it's changed, loads it
>> automagically.
>Does this also apply to user crontabs (supposing one decides to use them
>?)

  Yes. It also checks the modtime of its spool directory (/var/log/tabs),
which is updated by the crontab command.

---

  Stefano Riva
  Software Engineer - Systems Administrator
  Informazioni Editoriali I.E. Srl
  Phone +39-027528400, Fax +39-027528451
  Email sriva@alice.it


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