Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but as I do not find any other documentation, I suppose this is a bug: After installation, there is no root crontab file, but there's a file /etc/crontab. However, you must not install it using crontab /etc/crontab because this file is not in cron format. It reads something like this: 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly However, for vixie-cron, this should read: 01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly So, actually, if I am right, this are two bugs: - the crontab should be installed per default (otherwise important scripts from /etc/cron.* will simply never run - the format of /etc/crontab is wrong
/etc/crontab is read automatically by the cron daemon. See the cron(8) man page.