1CRON(8) System Manager's Manual CRON(8)
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6 cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (ISC Cron V4.1)
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9 cron [-n | -p | -m<mailcommand>]
10 cron -x [ext,sch,proc,pars,load,misc,test,bit]
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13 Cron should be started from /etc/rc.d/init.d or /etc/init.d
14 Cron searches /var/spool/cron for crontab files which are named after
16 accounts in crontabs found are loaded into memory. Cron also searches
17 for /etc/crontab and the files in the directory, which are in a differ‐
18 ent format (see crontab(5) ). Cron then wakes up every minute, examin‐
19 ing all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be
20 run in the current minute. When executing commands, any output is
21 mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO
22 environment variable in the crontab, if such exists).
23 Additionally, cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's
25 modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has,
26 cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those
27 which have changed. Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab
28 file is modified. Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime
29 of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.
30 Daylight Saving Time and other time changes
32 Local time changes of less than three hours, such as those caused by
33 the start or end of Daylight Saving Time, are handled specially. This
34 only applies to jobs that run at a specific time and jobs that are run
35 with a granularity greater than one hour. Jobs that run more fre‐
36 quently are scheduled normally.
37 If time has moved forward, those jobs that would have run in the inter‐
39 val that has been skipped will be run immediately. Conversely, if time
40 has moved backward, care is taken to avoid running jobs twice.
41 Time changes of more than 3 hours are considered to be corrections to
43 the clock or timezone, and the new time is used immediately.
44 PAM Access Control
46 On Red Hat systems, crond now supports access control with PAM - see
47 pam(8). A PAM configuration file for crond is installed in
48 /etc/pam.d/crond. crond loads the PAM environment from the pam_env
49 module, but these can be overriden by settings in the crontab file.
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52 -m This option allows you to specify a shell command string to use
53 for sending cron mail output instead of sendmail(8). This com‐
54 mand must accept a fully formatted mail message (with headers)
55 on stdin and send it as a mail message to the recipients speci‐
56 fied in the mail headers.
57 -n This option changes default behavior causing it to run crond in
59 the foreground. This can be useful when starting it out of
60 init.
61 -p Cron permit any crontab, which user set.
63 -x With this option is possible to set debug flags.
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67 On receipt of a SIGHUP, the cron daemon will close and reopen its log
68 file. This is useful in scripts which rotate and age log files. Natu‐
69 rally this is not relevant if cron was built to use syslog(3).
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72 In this version of cron , without the -p option, /etc/crontab must not
73 be writable by any user other than root, no crontab files may be links,
74 or linked to by any other file, and no crontab files may be executable,
75 or be writable by any user other than their owner.
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78 crontab(1), crontab(5), pam(8)
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81 Paul Vixie <vixie@isc.org>
824th Berkeley Distribution 10 January 2007 CRON(8)