Re: best practice for crontabs

[Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>]

Hello

Andy Fish (<ajfish@blueyonder.co.uk>) wrote:

> I have just figured out that there are 4 separate (types of) crontabs
> in debian
> 
>     /etc/crontab
>     /etc/cron.d/...
>     /etc/cron.daily, monthly, weekly
>     /var/spool/crontabs/...
> 
> but I'm none the wiser about why there are so many ways to do such a
> simple thing. Can anyone enlighten me as to which I should use when?

If you want a script to be run daily, weekly or monthly, place in in 
/etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly, or /etc/cron.monthly. Cron will take
care of the rest for you - you won't have to write a crontab line
telling cron when to run it. If daily, weekly and monthly is not
sufficient for you, create a file in /etc/cron.d with a crontab line
telling cron when to run it. Only use this for system jobs. If you want
to run jobs as a normal user, use

crontab -e

This will edit your user crontab in /var/spool/cron/crontabs.

best regards
        Andreas Janssen

-- 
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674
Registered Linux User #267976
http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html