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Date:      Sun, 5 Apr 1998 11:16:58 -0400
From:      "Harry Patterson" <harry@visiontm.com>
To:        <sfarrell+list@farrell.org>
Cc:        "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: crontab problems
Message-ID:  <01bd60a5$e09d08a0$f46190cf@hp.harry.com>

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Steve,

After reading your last post I removed the root crontab "crontab -u
root -r", changed the daily time to a current time as a test, then killed
the process (I used kill -1 115 (the process for cron)), and the messages
stopped and the daily ran.

I had read the line you list below in man 5 crontab concerning the system
crontab. What is hidden well is that you don't have to do anything (ie.
crontab crontab) to activate the system crontab. I assume it is
automatically checked every minute. This is where my problems began by
performing a root level crontab crontab thinking this is the way to update
the system crontab. Did I miss something in the man pages that explains how
the system crontab is loaded and am I correct that the procedure is to edit
/etc/crontab and restart the cron daemon?

Sincerely,

Harry Patterson <mailto:harry@visiontm.com>

>kill -HUP the cron daemon to get it to reread /etc/crontab.
>
>Well, it's kind of well hidden (i.e., amazingly poorly worded) in man
>5 crontab:
>
> 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 ``/<lo- gin-class>'' suffixes) if
> this is the system crontab file, followed by a command.




>"Harry Patterson" <harry@visiontm.com> writes:
>
>> I've read and re-read the man pages and can't find the distinction
between
>> root's crontab and /etc/crontab (user level differences are obvious with
the
>> user field removed) . I assumed that the only way to change the "system"
>> crontab was to edit it as root and perform a "crontab crontab" as root.
Is
>> there a different way? How does the system crontab take effect and how do
>> you change it?
>
>kill -HUP the cron daemon to get it to reread /etc/crontab.
>
>Well, it's kind of well hidden (i.e., amazingly poorly worded) in man
>5 crontab:
>
> 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 ``/<lo- gin-class>'' suffixes) if
> this is the system crontab file, followed by a command.
>
>--
>
>Steve Farrell
>
>
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