crontab deamon 4

[AIXFinder]

Is it possible to stop and start crontab daemon?
If yes, how do you do that?

thx much

 

[KenCunningham]

You could kill the process identified using a ps -ef | grep cron, then restart it using nohup /usr/sbin/cron &. though /etc/inittab specifies that the process should respawn if it dies - perhaps the nohup wouldn't be necessary.

 

[columb]

cron is started as a respawning daemon from init. As such I don't think you can change it's status without restarting to OS.

A quick and dirty answer is

crontab -l > /tmp/crontab.saved #backup the crontab
touch /tmp/empty.file #create an empty file
crontab -l /tmp/empty.file #delete all entries by replacing them with the 'contents' of empty.file
#cron is now running but has no entries so it won't do anything
crontab  /tmp/crontab.saved #reload the saved cronjobs

Ok, so that's not what you asked, but the effect is the same.

Ceci n'est pas une signature
Columb Healy

 

[mrn]

Use chitab to change respawn to off

chitab "cron:23456789ff:/usr/sbin/cron"

You may have to then

ps -ef|grep /usr/sbin/cron

and kill -9

and to turn it back on, change

the off to respawn



Mike

"Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters."

 

[p5wizard]

If you want to stop cron and keep it from restarting automatically, you can change its start-method from "respawn" to "off" using chitab (see man page).

to turn cron off:
chitab "cron:2ff:/usr/sbin/cron"

to turn cron back on:
chitab "cron:2:respawn:/usr/sbin/cron"


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[AIXFinder]

thx so much all.