Crontab Change location

Question

I want to set a personal crontab in another folder and executed.

For example I want it in /home/project/tasks/crontab

Like that it's easier to add/delete tasks.

Thank you for your answers.

Answer 1

The cron daemon determines where your active crontab is stored. On my system (Ubuntu), and probably on yours, it's under /var/spool/cron/crontabs/.

But you can maintain your crontab entries anywhere you like. Just remember to run

crontab /home/project/tasks/crontab

every time you update it.

(I suppose you could set up a cron job to do that for you. Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried invoking crontab from a cron job; I'm not 100% sure it would work.)

I personally find that a lot easier to manage than using, say, crontab -e; I can maintain my crontab file under a source control system, so I don't lose anything if I accidentally do crontab -r, for example.

DIGRESSION :

I suppose you could set up a cron job to do that for you. Just as an experiment, I tried setting up a crontab with the following command:

* * * * *    crontab .crontab

After manually running crontab .crontab once, changes in $HOME/.crontab were automatically applied after I saved the file, taking effect one to two minutes later.

But personally I'd much rather just run crontab FILENAME manually, so I don't have to worry about what will happen if I save an intermediate version of the file.