Crontab question

malak33 · 12-02-2012, 11:52 AM

so i was wondering if i could create a cron job by just adding a file called testcron under the /etc/cron.d/cron.daily directory or do i need to use crontab -e in order to create a cron job. I would be using Centos as an OS and as root. Thanks in advance.

shivaa · 12-02-2012, 12:15 PM

/etc/cron.d/cron.daily ... Strange!! Is really there any directory named cron.daily? I know cron.deny, but not cron.daily.
Anyway, you can use crontab and add as many as jobs in it.

To edit crontab, use:

Code:

crontab -e

And to check your scheduled jobs in crontab:

Code:

crontab -l

Make entries in following format:

Quote:

Minute Hour Day_of_month Month Day_of_week Command

chrism01 · 12-03-2012, 01:23 AM

FYI

Code:

ll /etc |grep cron
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    541 Jul 19  2011 anacrontab
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   4096 Nov 21 10:45 cron.d
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   4096 Nov 27 11:39 cron.daily
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root      0 Jul 19  2011 cron.deny
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   4096 Nov 21 10:46 cron.hourly
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   4096 Nov 21 10:45 cron.monthly
-rw-r--r--.  1 root root    457 Sep 27  2011 crontab
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root   4096 Sep 27  2011 cron.weekly

In any case, those should really only be used for system cronjobs.
For individual user's cronjobs (inc root), use

Code:

crontab -e