Hi,
I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I have a question regarding cron. Is it possible to get your Crontab file to include anoter crontab file?

Say for example that I have a website that have 20 scripts running at different times using Cron. I would like to setup a file called sitecron.txt like this:

0 1 * * * script1.hs
0 2 * * * script2.hs
0 3 * * * script3.hs
etc.

And then in my main cron file (the one I get when typing crontab -e) I would like to write something like this:

0 1 * * * normalcrontabscrip
<include sitecron.txt>

Is it possible to do an include like that in any way? I know I can just type everything in the main file but doing it like this would making things alot easier to maintain.

Thanks in advance!

Tomas

I don't see that this would be easier to maintain.

I suspect what you're saying is you have a lot you'd like to put in cron and want to do a simple edit session of a file rather than relying on crontab -e. If that's the case you can always just edit the cron file itself. (In fact I did this all the time before I found out about crontab -e.)

The cron files are in /var/spool/cron/crontabs. There should be a file with the name of the user that has cron entries. For most people the only one will be /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root.

I'd recommend saving the file before editing. Usually I do something like:
"cp -p root root.YYYYMMDD where YYYYMMDD" is current year, month and day.

After doing the edit just do "crontab -l" to verify cron sees the changes you made.

Of course you could just do your separate file and cat it into the end of the root cron file noted above:

"cat mycronfile >>/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root" to append to what is there

"cat mycronfile >/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root" to overwrite what is there.

Having said all that I'd say for most uses crontab -e is the way to go.