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There are two ways of programming the time that cron jobs are run on SuSE Linux systems. One is adding entries to the user’s crontab using crontab -e, the other adding scripts (be it linked or copied) to the directories /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly.

But the time, using the second method, is not configured the usual way: we see in /etc/crontab that every 15 minutes /usr/lib/cron/run-crons is run, a script which compares the timestamps of certain files with the current time in order to decide which cron jobs are to be run. These files are located at /var/spool/cron/lastrun and, quite expectedly, are named cron.hourly, cron.daily, etc.

So, if we want the daily jobs to be run at 6:00 AM, we must touch those files:

touch -t 200601240600 /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily

And that’s all. I don’t know when crontab usage was deprecated for daily, weekly, etc. task programming in SuSE, but it seems it was long ago.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Linux, SuSE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.