Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello.

We have a big crontab file where we need to comment out for few countries and also uncomment out based on situations . Could someone let us know how this can be done using a script .

Sample file look like & here i need to comment/uncomment based on country code .

Code:

0-59 ... u/app/atms/us/bin/location  MX K1
0-59 ... u/app/atms/us/bin/location  GB K1
0-59 ... u/app/atms/us/bin/location   US K1

Thanks
Ron T

You can use sed or awk to change the file. However that is not 100% safe. Some few older UNIXes do not "see" changes to crontab files unless the crontab -e [username] command is used. Not vi. Not sed. Not awk.

What OS and version do you have? -- the output of

Code:

 uname -a

is perfect.

Once we know what operating system you're using (as requested by jim McNamara), we'll also need to know what shell you're using.

And, we need to know how you plan to tell your script which country code or country codes are to be processed and whether the invocation of your script is supposed to comment out that country code or make the entry for that country code active.

What are the "situations" you mentioned? How can your script determine whether or not each such "situation" exists?

Will the crontab file to be updated be the crontab file of the user running this script? If not, how will the user running your script get permission to modify the crontab file of the user whose contab file it is that you want to update?

If you can show us what you have already tried to solve this problem on your own, it would help us understand what you are trying to do and where you are stuck.

Thanks . We are having AIX ,Linux Boxes & Shell is bash..

We would want to comment specific lines in the crontab file based on the country code & we would need to uncomment the lines based on the country code . for e.g MX is mexico, GB is england ..

We nowus crontab -e and does the editting manually to make the changes . For e.g if we waant to comment out let says 100 process running in different countries then it is time consuming, any help in this would be greatly appreciated .

Ron T

Hello ron5174,

It's a slight bug bear of mine, but GB is for Great Britain. England is a part of that nation state.


Kind regards,
Robin - actually living in England, but proud to be British

You can edit the crontab file directly using any tool/script provided you know that, of its own accord, it will not see the changes immediately. As long as you have your wits about you, and understand what's going on, you can manipulate crontabs.

See my post#4 on this thread:
Rename inside the crontab file

my bad , GB is for Great Britain So what i am getting is that we need to manually update the crontab file and there is no other way we can do this . is my understanding correct ?