Re: Help with cron settings?

[Alson van der Meulen <alsonm@linuxfreak.com>]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 04:41:45PM -0600, Damian Menscher wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2000, sc wrote:
> 
> > I'm having troubles getting my backups automated.  I set up a file "test" 
> > in the cron.d directory with the settings...
> > 
> > 5,10,15 * * * sunkcost /bin/tar -cf /home/sunkcost/test.tar 
> > /home/sunkcost/test.txt
> > 
> > I thought that cron was supposed to check through its crontab and related 
> > files every minute or so, but nothing happens.  I tried restarting cron 
> > manually, root as the user, and editing crontab directly, but no dice.
> > 
> > I'm probably missing something really obvious for what seems like a 
> > straightforward setup, but I'm stuck.  Can somebody give me some help 
> > here?
> 
> man crontab
> 
> You're supposed to use the crontab command to modify cron
> settings.  Updating files by hand won't work.
for /etc/cron.d ?
afaik crontab can only update user's crontab, not systemwide
like the files in /etc/cron.d, they are just processed by cron
periodically.

part from 'man 8 cron' :

DEBIAN SPECIFIC
       cron treats the files in /etc/cron.d as extensions to  the
       /etc/crontab  file (they follow the special format of that
       file, i.e. they include  the  user  field).  The  intended
       purpose  of this feature is to allow packages that require
       finer   control   of    their    scheduling    than    the
       /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}  directories allow to add
       a crontab file to /etc/cron.d. Such files should be  named
       after  the  package that supplies them. Files must conform
       to the same naming convention  as  used  by  run-parts(8):
       they must consist solely of upper- and lower-case letters,
       digits, underscores, and hyphens. Like  /etc/crontab,  the
       files  in  the  /etc/cron.d  directory  are  monitored for
       changes.

-- 
,-------------------------------------------.
> Name:           Alson van der Meulen      <
> Personal:       alson@linuxfreak.nl       <
> School:       alson@gymnasiumleiden.nl    <
`-------------------------------------------'
I cleaned up the root partition and now there's lots of free space.
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