In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, sawitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, William Schwartz wrote: > >> I guess my question is: what is the difference between the two? and which >> one should I use? I need a program to run every 5 minutes to do some >> polling. and I want it to happen 24/7. >> > >doesn't wipe out any changes I have made to the system files. I've never >modified the system crontab files and have been able to do whatever I >wanted to cron. However, I'm less sure that this is "a bad thing" because >some packages do exactly this when they are installed.
Packages should *not* modify /etc/crontab: they should put /etc/crontab "fragments" in the /etc/cron.d directory. However, you should be safe editing /etc/crontab. /etc/crontab is a "conffile" of the cron package. The significance of this is that dpkg will check that you haven't made your own changes to it before overwriting it with a newer version- if you have, you'll be given the option of installing the package maintainer's new version or keeping your old one, and can Just Say No :} Personally, I prefer to edit /etc/crontab to put in my own cron jobs, rather than diving into /var or using the crontab command. Different strokes for different folks. Another alternative is to put your crontab entries in, say, /etc/cron.d/local (and hope there is never a package called "local", which would be evil). SRH -- Steve Haslam Validation Engineer, ARM Limited, Cambridge, England almost called it today, turned to face the void along with the suffering and the question- "Why am I?" [queensrÿche]
