this is obsolete doc -- see http://doc.nethence.com/ instead

Happy happy crontab configuration 

Introduction 

I don't like the /etc/cron.d/ modularity shit, same for logrotate versus newsyslog, by the way. Let's use the good old legacy configuration, while making the scripts available to the shell environment. 

Configuration 

On Slackware Linux or Redhat systems, make a backup of the default cron tabs, 

crontab -l > .trash.crontab.default

This works just great on Redhat systems, and on Slackware Linux, just append the following to the existing cron tabs, 

crontab -e

like e.g., 

SHELL=/bin/ksh

HOME=/root

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/root/bin

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

CONTENT_TYPE="text/plain; charset=utf-8"

MAILTO=root

0 3 * * * for cron in /root/bin/cron.*; do $cron; print ''; done 

Note. The SHELL variable doesn't work on Slackware64 13.1 (dcron-4.4). So remove it and change 'print' to 'echo'. 

Note. No variable is defined inside cron by default, cannot use HOME=$HOME. Cannot even use $HOME within the PATH variable (on Redhat systems). 

Note. Change the time, date and scripts path accordingly.