Recovering my deleted crontab on FC3

abrumley · 07-22-2006, 01:55 PM

I'm posting into general because I'm hoping the solution is not fedora specific.

While I won't go into the brilliance of having a utility that has the "erase w/o warning" option (-r) right next to the commonly used "edit" option (-e) (neighboring keys on a keyboard) I fat finger'd and deleted my crontab for root. (as root entered `crontab -r`)

Looking at the documentation (man crontab), it looks like the cron file that is specific to a user is stored in "/var" which seems contrary to almost all other user-scoped software settings which are stored in the home directory.
I keep backups of my home directories, but according to what I've read, my root's cron file was not backed up. Am I correct here?

2nd question, did I just mess up all of my day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that came with my distro? If I remember correctly the file was pretty small, and may have only had one line or two of distro specific stuff. I can redo my additions without too much problems.

If so, can someone send me the orig lines that come with an FC3 install, or tell me where I can find/extract fresh root cron file?

Thanks for any help,
Alan

Tinkster · 07-22-2006, 03:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abrumley

I'm posting into general because I'm hoping the solution is not fedora specific.

While I won't go into the brilliance of having a utility that has the "erase w/o warning" option (-r) right next to the commonly used "edit" option (-e) (neighboring keys on a keyboard) I fat finger'd and deleted my crontab for root. (as root entered `crontab -r`)

The cron shipped with slackware DOESN'T have that option ;}

Quote:

Originally Posted by abrumley

Looking at the documentation (man crontab), it looks like the cron file that is specific to a user is stored in "/var" which seems contrary to almost all other user-scoped software settings which are stored in the home directory.
I keep backups of my home directories, but according to what I've read, my root's cron file was not backed up. Am I correct here?

Nope, crontabs for all users live under /var/spool/cron/ for
pretty much every distro and commercial Unix I've ever come
across ....

Quote:

Originally Posted by abrumley

2nd question, did I just mess up all of my day-to-day and hour-to-hour tasks that came with my distro? If I remember correctly the file was pretty small, and may have only had one line or two of distro specific stuff. I can redo my additions without too much problems.

No, you didn't. Those jobs are defined in /etc/cron.hourly and
so forth ...

Quote:

Originally Posted by abrumley

If so, can someone send me the orig lines that come with an FC3 install, or tell me where I can find/extract fresh root cron file?

Thanks for any help,
Alan

Sorry, I wouldn't touch a RH product by choice, and am in
the blessed position of not having any RH related installs
at work at the moment ;}

Cheers,
Tink

Matir · 07-22-2006, 11:54 PM

Most distros separate the user-level crontabs (even root's) from the system-wide crontab and the cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} cron dirs. You should be fine if you are able to restore your own cron jobs.

abrumley · 07-24-2006, 01:54 PM

Thanks for the answer and the breakdown on where cron stuff is stored.

haertig · 07-24-2006, 02:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abrumley

If so, can someone send me the orig lines that come with an FC3 install, or tell me where I can find/extract fresh root cron file?

If cron logging is turned on, you may be able to reconstruct the crontab file you deleted manually. I would expect the log to be in /var/log/cron.log or something similar, if logging is turned on. Check /etc/syslog.conf for logging settings for the cron facility (file could be in a different location for Fedora). Cron logging is off by default on my Debian boxes ... don't know about Fedora however.