Re Crontab Entry Editing

[Morgan Ives]

Brian Seppanen seppy@chartermi.net wrote:

> Has anyone successfully been able to define a process that safely can 
> modify cron using cfengine?

I assume that you are talking about crontab entries not "/usr/bin/crontab".
I routinely use "editfiles" to add, change and delete crontab entries in
Solaris, AIX, HPUX and Red Hat. 

After runnning the "editfiles" you must run a "shellcommands" to cause the 
update.  For example in solaris:

  /usr/bin/crontab  /var/spool/cron/crontabs/<user account>

In Red Hat, you might want to delete the comment lines like
 # (/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 $)
during the "editfiles" section. Otherwise they can build up.

     Morgan