Re: Where are user crons?

["Mike Williams" <drummike gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm htt-consult com> wrote:

I am switching computers and quite some time ago set up a crontab to
delete old thumbs.  I moved the shell script, but can't remember (and
did not document) how I set up the cron job.

Can't seem to find it in the gnome apps, nor can I find a .whatever file
that looks like a crontab.

This really isn't  a gnome question, but here are some pointers.   There are two main ways that crontab handles jobs, one via user crontabs and the other is by placing scripts in special directories under /etc.

First, try:
crontab -l
at a shell prompt - if you are logged in as the user that the cron jub was setup for you will get a linting of the crontab file for that user

If that doesn't help, try the same thing for other users, including root.

If you still don't find it then the job was probably setup via a file in one of the /etc/cron* directories.  You will need to be root to look in those directories.

Start with seeing what is one your system, this may vary somewhat based on your distro.  On my system there are these:

[root smokey ~]# cd /etc
[root smokey etc]# ls -la | grep cron
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root        298 2007-02-06 09:40 anacrontab
drwx------   2 root     root       4096 2008-02-16 04:46 cron.d
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root       4096 2008-03-02 04:33 cron.daily
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root          0 2007-08-16 02:08 cron.deny
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root       4096 2007-08-30 08:47 cron.hourly
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root       4096 2007-09-05 14:13 cron.monthly
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root        255 2007-08-30 08:47 crontab
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root       4096 2008-01-14 16:02 cron.weekly

Hope this helps, but even if it does you still may need to look at the docs.
The apropos command is quite Handy and shows related man pages:

apropos crontab
/etc/anacrontab [anacrontab] (5)  - configuration file for anacron
crontab              (1)  - maintain crontab files for individual users (ISC Cron V4.1)
crontab              (1p)  - schedule periodic background work
crontab              (5)  - tables for driving cron (ISC Cron V4.1)
crontabs            (rpm) - Root crontab files used to schedule the execution of programs

Note that there are multiple different man pages related to crontab, accessible via three different options to man:
man 1 crontab man 1p crontab man 5 crontab will each shoow you a different man page.

Good luck,

Mike