format of /etc/crontab?

[Joshua Oreman]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 01:54:36PM -0700 or thereabouts, Rich Morin wrote:
> The cron(8) man page (on my FreeBSD 4.7 system) says:
> 
>    Cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files which are named after
>    accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory.  Cron
>    also searches for /etc/crontab which is in a different format (see
>    crontab(5)).
> 
> The crontab(5) man page, however, says nothing about any differences in
> the file formats.  Instead, it appears to describe only the format that
> is used in /var/cron/tabs/* files.
> 
> I would like to know precisely how the format of /etc/crontab differs,
> but I can't find any man page that addresses this.  Help?

Normal crontabs have the time fields, and then the command to run.
/etc/crontab has an additional field after the time fields but before
the command -- the user to run the command as (usually root). This
is said in comments in /etc/crontab.

-- Josh

> 
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