System crontab

[Paul Richards]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 12:07:51PM +0100, adyas at twowaytv.co.uk wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know why the system crontab is kept in /etc/ and not in 
> /var/cron/tabs/?  I'm used to Solaris where all the cron tabs are in one 
> place which seems more consistent.

The /etc/crontab is for system jobs and /var/cron/tabs for user
jobs, even if one of those users is root. This is kind of a convention
as much as anything else and generally /etc/crontab shouldn't ever
be touched unless you want to change some default OS task. If
you want to add your own root jobs then use /var/cron/tabs using
crontab -e as normal.

-- 
Paul Richards