On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 04:08:17PM -0700, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
What is the ramifications to simply placing scripts in the /etc/cron.hourly directory as opposed to actually adding jobs via the crontab -e method? Is there any significance to using one method versus the other?
If you don't need to run something at a specific time then cron.hourly is easier and simpler. Just drop the script into the directory.
If you need something at a specific time then look into /etc/cron.d/ which is similar to traditional crontab format, but again is simply a matter of dropping files into that directory. eg % cat /etc/cron.d/sysstat # run system activity accounting tool every 10 minutes */10 * * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa1 1 1 # generate a daily summary of process accounting at 23:53 53 23 * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -A
Traditional crontab entries do still work, if you really want to deal with that, but it's harder to automate install/uninstalls.