On 8/17/2010 7:56 PM, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday August 17 2010, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2010-08-18 00:07, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday August 17 2010, Bob Williams wrote:
...
... I want to edit the system crontab, as I have some tasks that have to run as root. I'll try editing it manually and see what happens :)
You can simply:
% sudo crontab -e
That does not edit the system's crontab, but root's crontab.
OK. Is there effectively any difference?
Yes.
Ok not good enough or can't fill in the blanks yourself?
Define effectively.
Yes the root jobs will run, and yes being root they can do anything, and
yes on legacy unix that was in fact the definition of the "system" crontab.
Yes there is "effectively" a difference, but the "effect" happens to be
in transparancy/expectations/obfuscation. Few new linux admins will
think to look in root's crontab for typical cron jobs. So if there are
some, you will cause some amount of people writing duplicate or
conflicting jobs in /etc/crontab and discovering the hard way that some
bonehead before them did the unexpected. Also by deviating from most
common documentation, you cause newbies who don't know any better have
unnecessary problems later. Old docs will say "crontab -l >crontab ; vi
crontab ;crontab