How to use crontab (Gentoo)?

Question

First I installed and ran crontab:

emerge cron
crontab -e

In another console, I ran man cron, but this has no examples of how to use crontab. Where can I get examples, and why are there none in the man page?

Answer 1

Try reading man 5 crontab (which is probably a different page than you got by reading man crontab). man crontab likely directed you to a page about the crontab executable rather than the crontab file. The number 5 says to use category 5, "files, file formats, and conventions", rather than the default category (likely category 1, "general commands").

You can see all available sections for a command by using apropos like so:

$ apropos crontab
crontab (1)          - maintain crontab files for individual users (Vixie Cron)
crontab (5)          - tables for driving cron

There are also some examples on the relevant Wikipedia article.