Ina&Frank wrote:
>
> From my experience with AIX (IBM-UNIX) I always run crontab -e being
> the user I have to change for, root for the root crontable. This is how
> I got puzzled by Debian and did not really find a solution in the
> manpages for editing cron for root. For other users the manpage is
> sufficient. Or did I miss the hints for root? I read man crontab, man 1
> cron, man 5 cron. However the 'root-solution' I found on an internet-site.
You missed the details in the man page.
The format of a cron command is very much the V7 standard,
with a number of upward-compatible extensions. Each line
has five time and date fields, followed by a command, fol-
lowed by a newline character ('0). The system crontab
(/etc/crontab) uses the same format, except that the user-
name for the command is specified after the time and date
fields and before the command.
Basically the Vixie cron program has both the V7 style /var/spool/
user crontabs and the BSD style /etc/crontab system crontable. Both
are available to you. You get to choose which one you want to use.
Since you have been familiar with AIX which has user level crontabs
using crontab -e should have been fine. If you had used a format from
AIX it would have worked. Just don't cross the beams.
> And I think again, Debian is a very good Linux-flavour, but most of the
> time it is hard to find good documentation for this flavour. Or is there??
This is not Debian specific. All of the GNU/Linux flavors of which I
am aware use the Vixie cron program. Most commercial vendors such as
AIX use a derived program from System V.
Debian is really more of an operating system framework than a full
operating system itself. You get to choose which packages you want
installed and depending upon that it will behave differently,
customized to your needs.
As a framework some things are Debian specific. Most notable are the
alternatives, update-rc.d, building kernels, the menu system, things
like that. But most application programs in Debian, such as cron, are
really independent of the distribution. All distributions using that
package will behave the same if the package is the same on all
distributions.
Bob
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