On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 10:12:11PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2024-02-27 at 14:09, Gary Dale wrote:
> > as does find / -name crontab
>
> Invoked how? In particular, as which user?
>
> Assuming that the crontab files are actually named literally 'crontab'
> with no extra characters (perhaps by being stored one per directory), my
> guess would be that this is because /var/spool/cron/crontabs is not
> world-executable, and therefore most users won't be able to list its
> contents. If you run that 'find' command as root, or as a user which is
> in the group that owns the directory, you may see that the files show
> up.
>
> (If they aren't literally named just 'crontab' verbatim, then you'd also
> need to specify wildcards etc. in the find arguments, in order for it to
> recognize them as being a valid match.)
The only file named "crontab" is /etc/crontab.
Per-user crontabs which live in /var/spool/cron/crontabs are named for
their owner.
hobbit:~$ sudo ls /var/spool/cron/crontabs
greg
If you really want to find where the files live, and you didn't happen
to already know (approximately) where they are, and if you haven't been
reading this mailing list thread, then you could try reading cron(8):
NOTES
cron searches its spool area (/var/spool/cron/crontabs) for crontab
files (which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd); crontabs found
are loaded into memory. Note that crontabs in this directory should
not be accessed directly - the crontab command should be used to access
and update them.
This isn't hard to find. Seriously. Even if you tried crontab(1) first,
it's in there too:
DESCRIPTION
crontab is the program used to install, deinstall or list the tables
used to drive the cron(8) daemon in Vixie Cron. Each user can have
their own crontab, and though these are files in
/var/spool/cron/crontabs, they are not intended to be edited directly.
The only place it *isn't* is crontab(5), but hey, two out of three ain't
bad, as someone once sang.
