delay individual crontabs

[Mark Ellis]

I would like to be able to stop an individual users crontab from time to time -- without effecting other crontabs. Is there a slick way to go about this? Why isn't there a "crontab -delay" swicth?

Thanks!!

[Pete Randall]

Mark,

I guess you could try editing, moving or renaming individual users crontabs in /var/spool/crontabs/.


Pete

[Rodney Hills]

The usual way to adjust crontab is to-
crontab -l >my.cron
vi my.cron
crontab
Each individual user has a seperate crontab file (As I guess from your description). If you do the following as root, you can deactivate one specific user-

echo "crontab -l >/tmp/joeuser.cron ; crontab
This will save the users current crontab then clear out the crontab.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I don't know if this is slick enough to make you sweat Wesson Oil but here is one approach:

su - someuser
crontab -l > someuser.crontab # don't lose this file!!
crontab < /dev/null
exit


At this point, someuser's crontab is now empty.

To restore at some later time:
su - someuser
crontab < someuser.crontab
exit

[Mark Ellis]

I would like "root" intervention to be taken out of the loop and allow this user to stop their crontab jobs at any given time on their own.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

As long as the user is a cron user (as specified in /var/adm/cron/at.allow) then he can manage his own crontab. You simply drop the su - someuser commands in my above responce. You could put together a script to do all of this for him, saving his cronjobs file in his home directory.

[Pete Randall]

The same technique (crontab -l > somefile, etc) can work for the user as well. You could even script it for them. One script to set it aside, one to put it back.


Pete

[Mark Ellis]

Thank you all!

[Chris Wilshaw]

The other option would be to build in the delay mechanism to the jobs they're running.

while [ -f /tmp/CRONLOCK ]
do
echo "Cron locked. Sleeping."
sleep 30
done

Then, when you create /tmp/CRONLOCK, the jobs will sleep until the file is removed.

if you need to lock cron on a user-by-user basis, use a file from CRONLOCK.