Cron and cvsup

[Paul Richards]

On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 18:16, Mark Blackman wrote:
> On 17 Aug 2004, at 12:51, Grant wrote:
> 
> > Grant wrote:
> >
> >> Tom Hukins wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 11:59:43AM +0100, Grant wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I just added that line to /etc/crontab
> >>>>
> >>>> 5       0       *       *       *       root    
> >>>> /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g -L 2 /data/cvsfiles/cvs-portsupdate
> >>>>
> >>>> Is there anyway i could test that line other than waiting till 
> >>>> 12:05 ?
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> You could change the time to 10 minutes in the future and check it
> >>> runs.  Alternatively, you might find crontab2english useful:
> >>> http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SB/SBURKE/crontab2english_0.71.pl
> >>
> > Hey,
> >
> > I tried the setting it 10minutes in the future and it worked perfect :)
> >
> > Looks like i had been putting the my cron lines in the wrong file...
> 
> as an aside, /etc/crontab is meant for very general purpose system
> activites (and the cvsup update is appropriate for that), the user
> crontabs (like root) should be edited with 'crontab -e' (assuming
> you're running as the appropriate user).
> 
> The cvsup update job would also have been appropriate in the
> root crontab as well, so that wasn't the main issue.

Bit late replying to this but anyway...

Don't use /etc/crontab for anything. Always use crontab -e as root.
Consider the /etc/crontab to be an OS file and not a local crontab and
it will make your life a lot easier when FreeBSD applies changes to 
/etc/crontab for OS related crontab services.