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Ok I have a cron backup running every day at 12 but when I type crontab -l it says I have no crons schedulded so how do i view what crons are running and modify them? it is def running at 12 everyday.

crontab -l will list the current users cron jobs. if you have added to /etc/crontab or the common subdirectory structure in /etc/ then these will not show up. how did you configure this job in the first place? to change it just do the same again...

i didn't it was someone else, who is not around so any ideas?

crontab -e will put you in edit mode so you can see what jobs are there and make changes etc

Do you know which user the job is running under? If it's root doing the above command as root will show up root's jobs

You might also want to look at /etc/cron.* dirs ie

cron.daily/ cron.hourly/ cron.monthly/ cron.weekly/

I've no idea I tried both crontab -l for both the a/c the guy who set it up had and as root and it said both times that there was no crontab set up

Setting up a cron job as user fred

First, I'll set up a little diddy to test my script and make sure crontab is working.
For quick testing, I tell cron to run it every minute and that will be changed for my real backup cron.

For example:

Code:

#!/bin/bash



filename=`date '+%H%M'`

ls /home/images > ~/$filename.txt

Next, I make the script executeable
chmod +x /home/fred/backup.job

I use the vi editor
export EDITOR=vi

Use this command to set the crontab file as being /etc/crontab
crontab /etc/crontab

Edit the crontab to include your script. You could also put the script in one of the /etc/cron folders

crontab -e

Code:

SHELL=/bin/bash

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

MAILTO=root

HOME=/



* * * * * /home/fred/backup.job



# run-parts

01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly

02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily

22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly

42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

You need to restart the crond service as root user

Code:

su - -c "service crond restart"

After you have that working properly, you could change the backup script to something more usefull.
For example:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

filename=`date '+%m%d%y'`

cd /home/images

/bin/tar -cvzf /mnt/backup/${filename}.tar.gz . \

> /mnt/backup/${filename}.log \

2> /mnt/backup/${filename}err.log

And the cron could be a reasonable once a day setting.
Add a line to your personal crontab.....
00 23 * * * /mnt/backup/backup.job

Don't forget that root needs to restart the crond.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gazman1

I've no idea I tried both crontab -l for both the a/c the guy who set it up had and as root and it said both times that there was no crontab set up

Did you look in /etc/cron.daily (might be different on your sys)?