cronjobs without crontab entries 1

[greglocke]

Hi Gang:

Over the weekend I moved the two crontab files that were is the crontab directory up a level and renamed with a .bak as an extension. I was supprised to see that the cron jobs still ran. I finally had to kill the crond in order to stop them from executing at all.

I thought that any cron entries had to exist in the crontab directory with a valid user name. Does anybody have any idea why these still ran?

 

[MadMichael]

From 'man cron':

 cron only establishes a schedule for crontab files and at/batch
      command files during process initialization and when it is notified by
      at, batch, or crontab that a file has been added, deleted, or
      modified.