Hi Keith:

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:11 PM, keith smith <klsmith2020@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I have been setting up a cron job and found out there are two different
> crons. 1) the user cron located at  /var/spool/cron/ on my Fedora Box and 2)
> the system crontab located at /etc/crontab .
>
> When I do the crontab -e (if I am recalling correctly) I am editing the
> user crontab.
>
> To edit the system crontab do I just use VI or some other editor?
>
> I would have thought if I were root and issued crontab -e I would have been
> editing the system crontab, however this was not my experience.
>
> Thanks in advance for your insight.
>
>
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith
>
>
Crontab can be configured in /etc/crontab with  joe, vim, emacs or pico.

You can setup your default editor in bash as well to trivially use the
/var/spool/cron/root file:

*add to .bashrc*

#!/bin/bash
# F. Bar
# SomeCompany or dot.com
# $HOME/.bashrc
# Add various additional things that don't go into /etc/profile

# Date which can be trivially used for file copy or other tasks
# example: copy file.ext file.ext.$today

today=date +"%m-%d-%Y"

# Setup my default editor for crontab and other things (visudo)

export EDITOR=nano
export VISUAL=nano

#  Create a bash alias for crontab to use nano

alias crontab='env EDITOR=nano crontab -e'

# System management aliasesssssss
alias log='tail -n 200 /var/log/messages |less'
alias mailmelog='tail -n 500 /var/log/messages |mail -s "Message Log"
foobar@somecompany.com

# end custom .bashrc


Or from the command line:

sudo env EDITOR=nano crontab -e


Of course you can easily use the /etc/crontab also with

sudo nano /etc/crontab



crontab has a great deal of fun applications to maintain your system, run
daily alerts and provide ease for running backup scripts.  Anything that you
call from the command line can go into crontab.

Be sure to also check anacron for your daily scheduled jobs.  Anacron is
often a hiding place for crackers to place their reverse shell scripts and
other mayhem.

http://www.ouah.org/corezine1_back.txt

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510828

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