Vixie Cron Changes from V1 to V2 Paul Vixie 8-Feb-1988 Many changes were made in a rash of activity about six months ago, the exact list of which is no longer clear in my memory. I know that V1 used a file called POKECRON in /usr/spool/cron to tell it that it was time to re-read all the crontab files; V2 uses the modtime the crontab directory as a flag to check out the crontab files; those whose modtime has changed will be re-read, and the others left alone. Note that the crontab(1) command will do a utimes call to make sure the mtime of the dir changes, since the filename/inode will often remain the same after a replacement and the mtime wouldn't change in that case. 8-Feb-88: made it possible to use much larger environment variable strings. V1 allowed 100 characters; V2 allows 1000. This was needed for PATH variables on some systems. Thanks to Toerless Eckert for this idea. E-mail: UUCP: ...pyramid!fauern!faui10!eckert 16-Feb-88: added allow/deny, moved /usr/spool/cron/crontabs to /usr/lib/cron/tabs. allow and deny are /usr/lib/cron/{allow,deny}, since the sysv naming for this depends on 'at' using the same dir, which would be stupid (hint: use /usr/{lib,spool}/at). 22-Feb-88: made it read the spool directory for crontabs and look each one up using getpwnam() rather than reading all passwds with getpwent() and trying to open each crontab. 9-Dec-88: made it sync to :00 after the minute, makes cron predictable. added logging to /var/cron/log. 14-Apr-90: (actually, changes since December 1989) fixed a number of bugs reported from the net and from John Gilmore. added syslog per Keith Bostic. security features including not being willing to run a command owned or writable by other than the owner of the crontab 9not working well yet)