[CentOS] Re: cat cron jobs into crontab

Tue Mar 13 02:02:25 UTC 2007
Matt Hyclak <hyclak at math.ohiou.edu>

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 06:58:44PM -0700, Akemi Yagi enlightened us:
> > On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 05:21:47PM -0800, Karl R. Balsmeier enlightened
> > us:
> >> What's the best/safest way to "cat" the following job into crontab?
> >> 
> >> */3 * * * *  /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_megaraid_passive.sh >
> >> /dev/null 2>&1
> >> 
> >> I am used to doing this manually via crontab -e, but now I simply have
> >> too many centos servers to build in a given week (get to toss another
> >> 120K at some more 2U chenbro/tyan/amd64's -w000ooo).
> >> 
> >> 
> > echo '*/3 * * * *  /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_megaraid_passive.sh >
> > /dev/null 2>&1' > /etc/cron.d/check_megaraid_passive.sh
> > 
> > (Watch for wrapping, of course).
> > 
> > Matt
> 
> Isn't this supposed to be written to /etc/crontab (if root) or
> to /var/spool/cron/username (if a user) ?  Or maybe I am mistaken?
> 

You could, and then the next time cron is updated you either have
/etc/crontab overwritten by the new one, or you get a .rpmnew with important
changes that you are now missing.

Putting a file in /etc/cron.d is probably a better solution. Even better
than the echo command above would be to create the file in an RPM that 
can then get distributed via your favorite package updater.

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263