Re: How to edit the crontab

[Mitch Collinsworth]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Didier CONTIS wrote:

> I was wondering if someone would have some recommendations on how to
> edit
> the crontab of these 250 nodes. Editing the file is one thing but I am
> not sure
> about restarting the cron daemon.

Are you editting /etc/crontab or root's crontab in the crontabs spool
directory?  If /etc/crontab you may not need to restart cron.  At
least I've never needed to on any unix I've used that used /etc/crontab,
which is admittedly less than a complete set.  On systems where I wanted
to edit a spool directory crontab file I did the edit directly on that
file and then:

control:

        # where is the crontab command hiding?
        hpux|irix|irix64|freebsd::      crontab = ( /usr/bin/crontab )
        hpux10|aix|sun4::               crontab = ( /bin/crontab )
        osf::                           crontab = ( /usr/ucb/crontab )

        # where is the root crontab file hiding?
        aix|hpux::              root_crontab = ( /usr/spool/cron/crontabs/root )
        hpux10|irix|irix64|osf|sun4::
                                root_crontab = ( /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root )
        ultrix|freebsd::        root_crontab = ( /etc/crontab )


shellcommands:

        aix|hpux|hpux10|irix|irix64|osf|sun4::
                "$(crontab) $(root_crontab) >/dev/null 2>&1"