On January 11, 2006 12:41, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > Ron Hunter-Duvar wrote: ... > The reason crontab -l does not show the jobs in /etc/crontab is > because crontab does not manage them. Crontab manages user cron > jobs. These are stored in /var/spool/cron, with each user having > their own file. (If the user has never created a cron job, then > they will not have a file.) User cron jobs are also controlled > by the /etc/cron.allow and /etc/cron.deny files. > > One way to look at the jobs in /etc/crontab is to think of them > as system cron jobs instead of user cron jobs. The format of these > entries is slightly different then the ones created by crontab. The > main difference is that you have to specify the user the job is to > be run as. You can not do this with user's cron jobs. They must be > run as that user. I need to double check this, but as far as I know > the jobs run from /etc/crontab are not subject to /etc/cron.allow > and /etc/cron.deny. > > The entries in the /etc/cron.* directories are not run directly by > cron. What happens is that /usr/bin/run-parts is run by cron > because of the /etc/crontab entries, and run-parts then takes care > of running the scripts. So even if crontab -l did show the jobs run > from /etc/crontab, all it would show is the run-parts jobs. One last > note - run-parts does not have to be run by cron. You could use it > to run any directory of scripts. > > Mikkel
Thanks for the explanation. I figured it was something like that, system versus user job scheduling (though I would think that root cron jobs could be used for system level activities). I noticed that run-parts thing. That's an interesting piece of functionality to keep in mind. Calling it "crontab" in /etc seems slightly confusing to me, when it's not part of cron at all. So just out of curiosity, if it's not the cron daemon that drives this, what does? -- Ron ronhd at users dot sourceforge dot net Opinions expressed here are all mine. ____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from Mandriva? Go to http://store.mandriva.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrivaclub.com ____________________________________________________
