format of /etc/crontab?

Rich Morin rdm at cfcl.com
Thu Jul 3 15:04:00 PDT 2003


At 5:23 PM -0400 7/3/03, Paul Chvostek wrote:
>The /etc/crontab is largely self-documenting.  It is similar to the
>format of the other crontab files, and includes a comment line:
>
>#minute hour    mday    month   wday    who     command
>
>What further information do you need?

None, in the file itself, but the crontab(5) man page should be tweaked.
I have posted the following suggestion (to freebsd-doc at freebsd.org):

   The ``sixth'' field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be ...
   ---
   In the case of /etc/crontab, another field (username) follows the time
   and date fields.  This is normally set to root, but other names can be
   specified; the command will be setuid(2) to the corresponding uid.

   The ``final'' field (the rest of the line) specifies the command to be ...

The user shouldn't be required to spot the added "who" field in the comment,
let alone read the source code to determine that no other format changes
have been made.  The man pages promise to (and should) describe any format
differences.

-r
-- 
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