Re: Modifying Cron

[Brian E. Seppanen]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 wbmccarty@gmail.com wrote:

> So, the risk that concerns you is concurrent updating of a user cron
> file by the user who owns it? As I recall, editfiles operations are
> performed on a copy of the target file. If that's right, a user's
> updates to a cron file might be lost due to concurrent update, but I
> don't see the potential for corrupting the file.
> Perhaps I'm missing something important ....

In linux the following gets added to the cron headers, after you've 
interactively edited the file.

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/tmp/crontab.dPWWsC/crontab installed on Thu Jul 22 16:15:44 2004)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)

If I directly modify a spool file with editfiles will that modification
even be known to cron, or will it be as if no modification has ever been
made.

I'm inclined to lean towards using crontab cronfile to install, but I'm 
not sure how I'm going to be able to do that as different users...




Brian Seppanen
seppy@chartermi.net
906-475-0107 ext 1040