crontab update

[Edward Vielmetti]

In article <24572 at princeton.Princeton.EDU> tr at samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) writes:

   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.

This is OK but -- I have a bunch of diskless machines with their
crontab files all mounted via NFS from a server.  To update the whole
batch I need to log in to every machine and run 'crontab' -- if
I could automate the procedure somewhat I'd like to.

crontab doesn't communicate with signals at least in SunOS 4.x.
It writes something to /var/spool/cron/FIFO, but what?  Here's
the trace I got:
	open ("/var/spool/cron/FIFO", 05, 037777777776) = 3
	write (3, "".., 26) = 26
strings on crontab(1) doesn't help, anyone with sources care
to decode this?

--Ed