Re: hosers-talk: cron

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Jon Stewart:
> 
> Do we have permission to use cron? If so, how does one edit one's crontab 
> file? The man pages for cron and crontab had nothing, and I couldn't find 
> an example file.
> 
> 
> Jon

Sure, so long as it's not too processor intensive. If you make it run 'find /  foo' once a minute chances are I'll kill it. 

The man page you likely saw for crontab was crontab(1), which is for the crontab command that you use to edit your crontab. The one where you'd find an example is crontab(5), which describes the crontab file syntax. The latter is referenced at the bottom of the former under the SEE ALSO section. 

To get man pages specifically by section (necessary if there is more than one with the same name and the default one isn't the one you want), you need to precede the desired page name with the section number. So:

% man 5 crontab

This man page describes the crontab syntax very thoroughly and has a good example.

-- 
J.