crontab questions


 
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# 1  
Old 07-30-2009
crontab questions

I just started playing around with RHEL 5. What's the difference between adding crontab files to automate a daily task as opposed to adding them in the appropriate directory, such as cron.daily?
# 2  
Old 07-30-2009
I think the /etc/cron.daily and hourly etc. allows user to submit jobs and then they get executed at some pre-defined time. So all the jobs in /etc/cron.daily will fire daily at the time defined by the system. I don't know where and how the time is defined in Redhat.

If you want to setup your own time for jobs to fire, then you go the normal way, at least for me. Edit your crontab and set your own time and path to your jobs.

HTH,
Nitin Smilie
# 3  
Old 07-30-2009
They both work. /etc/cron.daily is just a convenience thing, a place to dump scripts you want to run daily. They're also easily automated -- a software installer could dump a file into /etc/cron.daily and expect it to get run at regular intervals without further ado. It also means not having to edit root's cron table or the system cron table for trivial things, which is good since the fewer opportunities to introduce mistakes the better.

cron tables have some advantages though. You can schedule precise times, not just some arbitrary 'daily'. And they're available to users, not just root -- users in the cron group, at least. User crontables get run with that user's permissions.
 
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