crontab(5) BSD File Formats Manual crontab(5) NAME crontab -- tables for driving cron DESCRIPTION A crontab file contains instructions to the cron(8) daemon of the general form: ``run this command at this time on this date''. Each user has their own crontab, and commands in any given crontab will be executed as the user who owns the crontab. Uucp and News will usually have their own crontabs, eliminating the need for explicitly running su(1) as part of a cron command. (Darwin note: Although crontab(5) are officially supported under Darwin, their functionality has been absorbed into launchd(8), which provides a more flexible way of automatically executing commands. See launchd.plist(5) for more information.) Blank lines and leading spaces and tabs are ignored. Lines whose first non-space character is a pound-sign (#) are comments, and are ignored. Note that comments are not allowed on the same line as cron commands, since they will be taken to be part of the command. Similarly, comments are not allowed on the same line as environment variable settings. An active line in a crontab will be either an environment setting or a cron command. An environment setting is of the form, name = value where the spaces around the equal-sign (=) are optional, and any subse- quent non-leading spaces in value will be part of the value assigned to name. The value string may be placed in quotes (single or double, but matching) to preserve leading or trailing blanks. The name string may also be placed in quote (single or double, but matching) to preserve leading, trailing…