CRON(8) 						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						   CRON(8)

NAME

     cron -- daemon to execute scheduled commands (ISC Cron V4.1)

SYNOPSIS

     cron [-n] [-x debugflags]

DESCRIPTION

     cron is normally started during system boot by rc.d(8) framework, if cron is switched on in rc.conf(5).

     It will return immediately so you don't have to start it with '&'.

     cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd.  Crontabs found are loaded into memory.  cron
     also searches for /etc/crontab which is in a different format (see crontab(5)).  Finally cron looks for crontabs in /etc/cron.d if it exists,
     and executes each file as a crontab.

     When cron looks in a directory for crontabs (either in /var/cron/tabs or /etc/cron.d) it will not process files that:
	   -   Start with a '.' or a '#'.
	   -   End with a '~' or with ``.rpmsave'', ``.rpmorig'', or ``.rpmnew''.
	   -   Are of zero length.
	   -   Their length is greater than MAXNAMLEN.

     cron then wakes up every minute, examining all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the current minute.  When
     executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab,
     if such exists).

     Events such as START and FINISH are recorded in the /var/log/cron log file with date and time details.  This information is useful for a num-
     ber of reasons, such as determining the amount of time required to run a particular job.  By default, root has an hourly job that rotates
     these log files with compression to preserve disk space.

     Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab or /etc/cron.d) has changed,
     and if it has, cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have changed.  Thus cron need not be restarted when-
     ever a crontab file is modified.  Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.

     The following options are available:

     -x      This  flag turns on some debugging flags.	debugflags is comma-separated list of debugging flags to turn on.  If a flag is turned on,
	     cron writes some additional debugging information to system log during its work.  Available debugging flags are:
	     sch   scheduling
	     proc  process control
	     pars  parsing
	     load  database loading
	     misc  miscellaneous
	     test  test mode - do not actually execute any commands
	     bit   show how various bits are set (long)
	     ext   print extended debugging information

     -n      Stay in the foreground and don't daemonize cron.

Daylight Saving Time and other time changes
     Local time changes of less than three hours, such as those caused by the start or end of Daylight Saving Time, are handled specially.  This
     only applies to jobs that run at a specific time and jobs that are run with a granularity greater than one hour.  Jobs that run more fre-
     quently are scheduled normally.

     If time has moved forward, those jobs that would have run in the interval that has been skipped will be run immediately.  Conversely, if time
     has moved backward, care is taken to avoid running jobs twice.

     Time changes of more than 3 hours are considered to be corrections to the clock or timezone, and the new time is used immediately.

SIGNALS

     On receipt of a SIGHUP, the cron daemon will close and reopen its log file.  This is useful in scripts which rotate and age log files.  Natu-
     rally this is not relevant if cron was built to use syslog(3).

FILES

     /var/cron/tabs  cron spool directory
     /etc/crontab    system crontab file
     /etc/cron.d/    system crontab directory
     /var/log/cron   log file for cron events

SEE ALSO

     crontab(1), crontab(5)

AUTHORS

     Paul Vixie <vixie@isc.org>

BSD
								 October 12, 2011							       BSD