viewing crontab

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sirs,

Is there any precaution required while viewing the crontab entries by using the command "crontab -l" as a powerbroker user ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[harry d brown jr]

NO

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Rita C Workman]

Well crontab -l is simply to view the cronfile...it doesn't change it. If you have rights, and rights can be distributed via Powerbroker, than you can run the command.

Rgrds,
Rita

[Kent Ostby]

this should not cause any problems, however, it will only list the crontab for the current user if you do simply crontab -l

If you wish to see, for instance, root's crontab, you would need to look at the actual file or run crontab -l as the root user.

[Rick Garland]

The '-l' option to the crontab command is just that - list. Will not allow edits and will just scroll by on the screen until end of file.

You can pipe the output to '|more' so you can view a screen at a time.

I am more careful with the 'r' key next to the 'e' key
crontab -e edit the crontab
crontab -r remove the crontab (OUCH!!!)

[A. Clay Stephenson]

No, just make sure that you specify the "-l" option; for example, if you did, crontab and then triggered an End-of-file (Ctrl-D, for example) thinking the command was hung, you just rewrote the crontab with a null file.

[Sandman!]

Clay pointed out a very important pitfall about crontab. In case you mistakenly typed crontab at the command line hit "Ctrl-C" to avoid overwriting your crontab file with a null file.

regards

[Basheer_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Shiv

As a precaution, I always make a backup copy of crontab roots and others before accidentally typing crontab -r

[Geoff Wild]

Crontabs can be viewed by root in:

/var/spool/cron/crontabs

Another thing you can do is:

crontab -l > mycrontab

then use your favourite editor (like vi) or just more or cat mycrontab

Rgds...Geoff