Re: crontab

[mbaker@iee.org (Mark Baker)]

In article <[🔎] 19971203150657.45649@kite>,
	joey@kitenet.net (Joey Hess) writes:

> I lookd at how smail currently does it: it uses the crontab command to add a
> crontab for the mail user. However, it doesn't check to see if the mail user
> already has a crontab. Seems very broken to me.

Try looking at how exim does it---it adds a crontab for the mail user, but
does correctly handle the mail user's existing crontab.

To install it does this:

                # Install in crontab for user mail if not there
                oldcrontab=$(crontab -u mail -l|tail +4)
                if [ "$(echo "$oldcrontab"|grep exim)" == "" ]; then
                        cat <<EOM | crontab -u mail -
$oldcrontab
23 * * * *      /usr/sbin/exim -q
EOM
                fi

                # Uncomment crontab entry if it's commented
                crontab -u mail -l | tail +4 | sed 's/^#\(.*exim\)/\1/' \
                                            | crontab -u mail -

On remove (prerm) it does:

                # Comment out crontab entry
                crontab -u mail -l | tail +4 | sed 's/^\(.*exim\)/#\1/' \
                    | crontab -u mail -


And on purge it does:

                # Remove from mail user's crontab
                crontab -u mail -l | tail +4 | grep -v exim | crontab -u mail -

The tail +4 in each case is to get rid of the header.

(By the way, I'd like to apologise for the ^Ms on the end of the lines of
this and other postings I've made to the debian lists. This is a bug in
knews which I'm in the middle of trying to fix. Obviously I'll file a bug
report with my patch when I've got it working).
.