Scott Leighton wrote:
cron uses the directory timestamps to decide whether or not to reload crontabs. The various important directories that it monitors include /etc/cron.d, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.monthly and the user crontabs at /var/spool/cron/tabs
Almost. :-) cron monitors directory timestamp of /etc/cron.d and /var/spool/cron/tabs and the file timestamp of /etc/crontab. This is explained in the man page of cron, in the 3rd paragraph. cron does not monitor /etc/cron.{daily,hourly,monthly}. These scripts are executed by /usr/lib/cron/run-crons which is called in /etc/crontab every 15 minutes. While I'm at it: The actual time when daily jobs are executed is determined by the creation time stamp of /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily. Since this is the creation time stamp, one cannot change the time by touching the file. Instead, one must remove it with an at job. (Which is a brain-dead design decision, IMHO.) HTH, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany