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CRON(8) | System Manager's Manual | CRON(8) |
NAME¶
cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron)SYNOPSIS¶
cron [-f] [-l] [-L loglevel]DESCRIPTION¶
cron is started automatically from /etc/init.d on entering multi-user runlevels.OPTIONS¶
- -f
- Stay in foreground mode, don't daemonize.
- -l
- Enable LSB compliant names for /etc/cron.d files. This setting, however, does not affect the parsing of files under /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly or /etc/cron.monthly.
- -n
- Include the FQDN in the subject when sending mails. By default, cron will abbreviate the hostname.
- -L loglevel
- Tell cron what to log about jobs (errors are logged regardless of
this value) as the sum of the following values:
- 1
- will log the start of all cron jobs
- 2
- will log the end of all cron jobs
- 4
- will log all failed jobs (exit status != 0)
- 8
- will log the process number of all cron jobs
- The default is to log the start of all jobs (1). Logging will be disabled if levels is set to zero (0). A value of fifteen (15) will select all options.
NOTES¶
cron searches its spool area (/var/spool/cron/crontabs) for crontab files (which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd); crontabs found are loaded into memory. Note that crontabs in this directory should not be accessed directly - the crontab command should be used to access and update them. cron also reads /etc/crontab, which is in a slightly different format (see crontab(5)). In Debian, the content of /etc/crontab is predefined to run programs under /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly. This configuration is specific to Debian, see the note under DEBIAN SPECIFIC below. Additionally, in Debian, cron reads the files in the /etc/cron.d directory. cron treats the files in /etc/cron.d as in the same way as the /etc/crontab file (they follow the special format of that file, i.e. they include the user field). However, they are independent of /etc/crontab: they do not, for example, inherit environment variable settings from it. This change is specific to Debian see the note under DEBIAN SPECIFIC below. Like /etc/crontab, the files in the /etc/cron.d directory are monitored for changes. In general, the system administrator should not use /etc/cron.d/, but use the standard system crontab /etc/crontab. /etc/crontab and the files in /etc/cron.d must be owned by root, and must not be group- or other-writable. In contrast to the spool area, the files under /etc/cron.d or the files under /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly may also be symlinks, provided that both the symlink and the file it points to are owned by root. The files under /etc/cron.d do not need to be executable, while the files under /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly do, as they are run by run-parts (see run-parts(8) for more information). cron then wakes up every minute, examining all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the current minute. When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, if such exists). The children copies of cron running these processes have their name coerced to uppercase, as will be seen in the syslog and ps output. Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on the /etc/crontab file) has changed, and if it has, cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs files and reload those which have changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is modified. Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab. Special considerations exist when the clock is changed by less than 3 hours, for example at the beginning and end of daylight savings time. If the time has moved forwards, those jobs which would have run in the time that was skipped will be run soon after the change. Conversely, if the time has moved backwards by less than 3 hours, those jobs that fall into the repeated time will not be re-run. Only jobs that run at a particular time (not specified as @hourly, nor with '*' in the hour or minute specifier) are affected. Jobs which are specified with wildcards are run based on the new time immediately. Clock changes of more than 3 hours are considered to be corrections to the clock, and the new time is used immediately. cron logs its action to the syslog facility 'cron', and logging may be controlled using the standard syslogd(8) facility.ENVIRONMENT¶
If configured in /etc/default/cron in Debian systems, the cron daemon localisation settings environment can be managed through the use of /etc/environment or through the use of /etc/default/locale with values from the latter overriding values from the former. These files are read and they will be used to setup the LANG, LC_ALL, and LC_CTYPE environment variables. These variables are then used to set the charset of mails, which defaults to 'C'. This does NOT affect the environment of tasks running under cron. For more information on how to modify the environment of tasks, consult crontab(5) The daemon will use, if present, the definition from /etc/timezone for the timezone. The environment can be redefined in user's crontab definitions but cron will only handle tasks in a single timezone.DEBIAN SPECIFIC¶
Debian introduces some changes to cron that were not originally available upstream. The most significant changes introduced are:- —
- Support for /etc/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} via /etc/crontab,
- —
- Support for /etc/cron.d (drop-in dir for package crontabs),
- —
- PAM support,
- —
- SELinux support,
- —
- auditlog support,
- —
- DST and other time-related changes/fixes,
- —
- SGID crontab(1) instead of SUID root,
- —
- Debian-specific file locations and commands,
- —
- Debian-specific configuration (/etc/default/cron),
- —
- numerous other smaller features and fixes.
SEE ALSO¶
crontab(1), crontab(5), run-parts(8)AUTHOR¶
Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com> is the author of cron and original creator of this manual page. This page has also been modified for Debian by Steve Greenland, Javier Fernandez-Sanguino and Christian Kastner.19 April 2010 | 4th Berkeley Distribution |