Hi! On Friday 26 September 2003 00:46, Nick Brown wrote: > Sorry I shouldn't have called them lock files, as I'm not sure that's > what they are. In fact these files are simply deleted hourly/daily etc > without checks, so they cannot serve the purpose you describe. > Really I'm hoping for someone to explain their purpose.
The files in /var/spool/cron/lastrun/ are used to check whether cron has run the scripts at the appropriate time. If you never shut down you computer then they are not really needed (I think). But if you shut down your machine then the next time you boot it up cron checks the time of the files and runs the scripts. So, if your machine was powered down for more than a day then cron will run the scripts under /etc/cron.hourly and /etc/cron.daily ; if it was powered down more than a week then cron will run the scripts under /etc/cron.hourly , /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.weekly ; etc. So this is useful if you shut down the machine. If it is always on, then it is not really needed, but it doesn't hurt anyway. Hope that helps. Cheers, Renat -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
