Re: restart cron in Solaris

[Darren Dunham]

> 
> 
> Is this safe? Seems dangerous to edit /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
> directly, cron is placing the real file here, what if cron overwrites the
> edits?

'cron' doesn't move/write crontab files, 'crontab' does.  

Yes, there's a race condition here, but you should decide how bad it
could be.  I would imagine that it's pretty safe.  If you're talking
about root's crontab, then if you know that it's maintained by cfengine,
you shouldn't be editing it anyway.

For root, it's easy enough to just run 'crontab <tempfile>' and activate
it.  For other users, you'd have to do that in an 'su', and it might be
easier to edit the file directly and then either

kill/restart cron or 
talk to the FIFO directly

as a method of activating the edits.

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham@taos.com
Unix System Administrator                    Taos - The SysAdmin Company
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
          < How are you gentlemen!! Take off every '.SIG'!! >