Better understanding of Cron Jobs/Crontab??

200mg · 05-15-2009, 08:48 AM

I am trying to better understand the post linked below.

I too have a cron job that root runs every 10 minutes that shows up in /var/log/auth.log, but if I run crontab -l as root it says:

Code:

no crontab for root

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...th.log-702381/

rayfordj · 05-15-2009, 09:25 AM

It is most likely running from your system's cron (as root).
without knowing your distro, try starting with:

Code:

/etc/cron.d/

200mg · 05-15-2009, 09:45 AM

wow ray, you're good. It looks like a script called anacron is running from /etc/cron.d using the root account. I'm looking to see what anacron does right now. Thanks for the reply

rayfordj · 05-15-2009, 09:57 AM

man anacron
Anacron can be used to execute commands periodically, with a frequency specified
in days. Unlike cron(8), it does not assume that the machine is running continu-
ously. Hence, it can be used on machines that aren’t running 24 hours a day, to
control daily, weekly, and monthly jobs that are usually controlled by cron.