lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) (05/04/89)
[ This has nothing to do with mail anymore - followups in comp.unix.questions ] In article <483@sequoia.UUCP> dewey@sequoia.UUCP (Dewey Henize) writes: >In article <1524@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes: >>The S5R3 "cron" and, I think, the S5R2 "cron", do not check any of the >>"crontab" files unless they're told to; > >Can someone who's looking at source or speaking from experience tell me, please, >HOW they're told to? Is there a signal that could be used? It would seem the >most 'unixy' thing, but I've not found it in any of our docs, and we don't have >any source... The SVR3 cron communicates with the crontab command via a named pipe (/usr/lib/cron/FIFO) that's created when cron starts up. You would have to fake the messages being written on the pipe to get cron to do its internal updates, which means re-inventing crontab(1), so why bother? Unfortunately, cron no longer pays attention to signals (other than SIGTERM) so kill -1 no longer does anything. You could write a script to pull cron's PID out of a ps listing, send it a SIGTERM, then restart cron. Or you could just use crontab(1) ... :-) -- Lyndon Nerenberg Computing Services Athabasca University {alberta,attvcr,ncc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@nexus.ca