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What does this line mean in /etc/crontab file ?

59  *  * * *    root    rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
Matix123
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2 Answers2

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59 * * * * - Run every hour at minute :59, every day of month, every month and every day of week
root - run as user root
rm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly - execute this command

Here's a nice representation from a crontab example on CentOS 6:

# Example of job definition:
.---------------- minute (0 - 59)
|  .------------- hour (0 - 23)
|  |  .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
|  |  |  .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
|  |  |  |  .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
|  |  |  |  |
*  *  *  *  * user-name command to be executed
w00t
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I think this prevents to run every hour the cron jobs!

If you have a job that runs every hour from some user and you want to find the job just run :

for user in $(cut -f1 -d: /etc/passwd); do crontab -u $user -l; done

This command is to list all cron jobs from all users. In some cases you will find cron jobs here /etc/crontab but this is not a file for your cronjobs is only system-wide crontab

Dimitrios
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