UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I need to do some DB maintenance, but there are cron jobs running all weekend.

How do I stop the cron jobs (that I see when I do a crontab -l) for the weekend then restart the cron jobs.

My understanding is that when the system is startted cron jobs in the /usr/spool/cron/crontabs folder are automatically queud up.

How do I pause these jobs?

How do I restart them after I'm done?

You could save your crontab:
crontab -l > crontab.save
more crontab.save

After you're sure you saved a copy, delete your crontab:
crontab -r

Later, you can:
crontab < crontab.save
crontab -l
to restore things.

Could you not stop the cron daemon (crond) and then restart it after the maintenance is complete?

Change to whatever dir your crond is in (on my Linux box, /etc/rc.d/crond) and then run

Code:

./crond stop

as root. This would, however, stop cron jobs for ALL users.

When the work is done, a

Code:

./crond start

should get it up again.

Cheers,
ZB
http://www.zazzybob.com