From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 8 0:34: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from apotheosis.org.za (apotheosis.org.za [137.158.128.27]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 855E537B611 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 00:34:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwest@uct.ac.za) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 10:31:42 +0200 From: Matthew West To: David Kelly Cc: mark , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Crontabs Message-ID: <20000308103142.A32571@apotheosis.org.za> Mail-Followup-To: David Kelly , mark , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG References: <200003080101.TAA08106@nospam.hiwaay.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <200003080101.TAA08106@nospam.hiwaay.net>; from "David Kelly" on Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 07:01:59PM Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 07:01:59PM -0600, David Kelly wrote: > Matthew West writes: > > On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 11:19:49AM +0200, mark wrote: > > > I'm have a problem with the crontabs ..... in Solaris 2.7 > > Why are you asking Solaris questions on a FreeBSD list? > Back off. Its not as if he was asking Windows questions. Whoops! It was meant as a serious question, not as a flame. There are several Solaris related lists which are more suited to this kind of question. > He's probably asking here because there is a good chance *we* know the answer. I'm not entirely sure that this is something that should be encouraged. The list might end up with more noise than signal. > Plus any Unix issue should be fair game here if somehow FreeBSD differs from > another Unix. Point. > > > I have added this line to the root crontab located in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ > > You'll probably have better luck with "crontab -e". > I forgot if Solaris has "-e". Solaris does indeed have "-e", as does SunOS 4.x (I don't have anything older than that to check on). > Hey! I'd bet mere users are not allowed into /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ > meaning Mark was editing somebody's crontab as root? Maybe it was root's > crontab. If you're needing to edit another user's crontab as root: FreeBSD# crontab -u username -e Solaris# crontab -e username > You have to pass the crontab file thru the crontab executable in order for > cron to know things have changed. I think. I suspect the reason for editing the files through crontab is to allow their syntax to be checked before cron has to deal with them. > FreeBSD's cron keeps a crontab for root in /etc/. A more correct name would be the "system" crontab (although it's called root's crontab), because the root user can still have it's own crontab under "crontab -e". > This crontab has a slightly different format than the one users are allowed > to use. Also *this* file is to be edited directly, which may be how bad > habits were formed? I've also found that this has bitten a couple of people coming over from other UNIX environments; where they edit /etc/crontab, and then want to check it in with "crontab < /etc/crontab". Of course, when they do this, the extra field breaks things, or their jobs are run in duplicate. Perhaps this should be documented in the comments at the top of /etc/crontab? -- mwest@uct.ac.za To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message