i want find the place where the crontab file is stored i dont mean in /etc/cron. when we list crontab -l it will list the schedule jobs , does this content is stored in some directory as a file..
Please clarify

Don't expect it to be in a file. Depending on the implementation on some systems it could be kept in a DB or anywhere else. Don't even dig into it.
If you really need this then specify why.

I guess it will be stored /var/spool/cron/ but we only root has permission for those directories

Thanks
Nagarajan G

If root edits the files directly, changes will not take effect in most cases and can even be lost. With most versions of cron, the answer to the question is "in memory". Those files are read only as cron starts up. The alternative would be to reread them every minute which would put quite a load on the system. It is critical that you use the crontab command to view and change those files. The crontab command interacts with cron to change the tables in cron's memory.