Custom directory for cron commands

Question

I'm using vixie cron on Debian/Ubuntu. How to set a custom directory to be read by cron? I want to lead crontab to run commands found in a series of files, e.g.

/home/cron/*.cron

or perfectly

/home/*/cron/*.*

In fact, instead of putting cron commands in /var/spool/cron/crontab/root, I want to spread commands in these folder.

Is it possible and recommended to use include for calling other files within root file?

Answer 1

Cron in debian reads commands from 3 locations - first is users crontabs in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/$user, then it reads global /etc/crontab and then all files from /etc/cron.d.

But you can't easily have multiple crontabs per user. Only files in /var/spool/cron/crontabs are per-user. The other two are system-wide and each line contains a username, under which is the command run. You could integrate/link those individual files into /etc/cron.d, but users would be able to run commands under root or other user.

So if one crontab per user is OK, just make links from your location to /var/spool/cron/crontabs. If you need multiple per user, then you need to make a script which will take your users's cron files, and modify it for system-wide crontab (that means adding a field with their username) and adding those under /etc/cron.d.