On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, William Schwartz wrote:
> There is a filed called "crontab" in the "etc" directory. That is my "system > wide" crontab. This file I am able to edit and modify... > > then there are crontab files in the "/var/spool/cron/crontabs" directory > that are to be edited with the crontab command... > > The "crontab" file in the "etc" directory has a parameter called "user". and > I use it to specify "root" because I need to schedule a job as root... > > I guess my question is: what is the difference between the two? and which > one should I use? I need a program to run every 5 minutes to do some > polling. and I want it to happen 24/7. > I would accomplish this using the crontab command. crontab allows a user to access cron by manipulating (creating, listing, removing) crontab files. For example, at home I set up a crontab file to get my email from my ISP using fetchmail. I create a file in my account that is in the crontab format and then use the command 'crontab cronfile' (where 'cronfile' is the aformentioned crontab file) to create the crontab file and therefore have cron operate on it. For system wide things, I've done the same thing as root. I'm not sure that this is "the right way" but it works just fine. This seems more straightforward to me than modifying the crontab files in the system, mostly because I like to set things up so that upgrading a distribution doesn't wipe out any changes I have made to the system files. I've never modified the system crontab files and have been able to do whatever I wanted to cron. However, I'm less sure that this is "a bad thing" because some packages do exactly this when they are installed. Hope this helps a little...
