[CLUE-Tech] crontab not working

[David Anselmi]

Ski Dawg wrote:
[...]
> 
> I just figured out what was going on with my cron daemon. Basically, the
> cron daemon was not reading any changes to the crontab files in
> /var/spool/cron or the file /etc/crontab. 

There are (at least) two versions of cron.  One (by Paul Vixie) checks 
its files every minute and re-reads them if they've changed.  The other 
has to be told to re-read its files.  IIRC, there is a way to tell it to 
update, restarting isn't necessary.

Vixie cron is a little unusual.  It seems more common for daemons to 
require a restart (or typically kill -HUP) to tell them their config has 
changed.  Sometimes you can run the program again with a special switch 
e.g., init -q (for some versions) will tell init that the inittab has 
changed.

Sometimes you find out the program that's running isn't the one you have 
docs on.

Dave