User: John Seth

Re:It's never a simple answer

On: Why Slackware Still Matters

ngunton wrote:
Different locations for config files. Again, this is my problem, not slackware's, but it's just something that trips me up occasionally (less as time goes on). So stuff is generally under /etc/rc.d. But there is no easy way to restart cron, for example. And there's no /etc/crontab. So it's harder to make quick changes to that. It's somewhere else, but I always forget where. And I always have to look for /var/spool/cron/crontab, for some reason. Again, these are my problems - it's just a little irritating that it's different from the way other distros work. In any case, why on earth couldn't we just put all config files under one directory??? This would make things so much easier to back up.

Easy suggestion for you, from one slacker to another ;) Create your own /etc/crontab, and type "crontab /etc/crontab" as root, it'll replace the crontab entry in /var/spool/cron. From then on, edit the file, type "crontab -d" followed by "crontab /etc/crontab", and "crontab -l" to make sure it's all in there the way you want.

If you wanted, add this to /usr/local/sbin:

#!/bin/sh
#

echo "Restarting root cronjobs...";
# stop crontab
/usr/bin/crontab -d

# add /etc/crontab to cronjob
/usr/bin/crontab /etc/crontab

echo " Done.\n"

It's cheap, and by no way the most secure script, but it's a quickie.

I've rewritten my root crontab a dozen times, and even written my own rc.d/rc.* scripts for starting non-slackware software like PostFix and Dovecot, which I prefer to Sendmail and UW IMAP.