crontab update

[Tom Reingold]

A few people have responded but may not know that there are two styles
of cron.  We don't know which the person who asked the question is
running.

In BSD-style cron, the crontab is checked every minute, so after
editing /usr/lib/crontab, nothing is required.

Is SysV-style cron, there is no /usr/lib/crontab.  Instead, there are
files called /usr/spool/cron/crontabs/name, where name is a login
name.  There is probably a file called root, which is probably what the
guy was talking about if he has SysV-style cron.  The crontab(1)
command sends the proper signal to the cron process to reread the
file.  It is then kept in memory.

Note that SunOS 4.x has SysV-style cron.

With either style cron, no reboot is necessary.

--
tr at samadams.princeton.edu