Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 613449
cron manpage contains incorrect information
Last modified: 2010-10-22 05:00:11 EDT
man crond shows the following (my comment are with ***): CRON(8) CRON(8) NAME cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (cronie V1.2) SYNOPSIS cron [-n | -p | -m<mailcommand>] cron -x [ext,sch,proc,pars,load,misc,test,bit] *** cron? there is no "cron" command, it's *crond*. (Thre is even "man cron" manpage alias, but there is no actual "cron" *command*). ... There are two ways, how the changes are checked in crontables. *** The comma is perhaps not needed. I'd also replace "crontables" with "crontabs". The first is checking the modtime of file and the other is using inotify support. *** I am no expert, but it looks like slightly broken English, should be "The first METHOD is ... and the other ONE is ..." You can find out which of them are you using, if you check /var/log/cron where is (or isn’t) inotify mentioned after start of dae- mon. *** More English breakage. I propose "You can find out which of them are in use by checking crond log (see whether it mentions inotify or not)" The inotify support is watching for changes in all crontables and touch the disk only in case that something was changed. In other case cron checks each minute to see if its crontables modtime have changes and reload those which have changes. *** More. crontables -> crontabs' , reload -> reloads There is no need to restart cron after some of the crontable is modified. *** crontable -> crontabs This option is used also when inotify couldn’t be initialized. Cron is checking those files or directories: *** Cron is checking -> Crond checks /etc/crontab system crontab is usually for running daily, weekly, monthly jobs. /etc/cron.d/ where are system cronjobs stored for different users. *** Badly phrased. /var/spool/cron that’s mean spool directory for user crontables. *** "mean spool directory"? It's basically means "bad spool directory" :D Note that the crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab. ... -n This option changes default behavior causing it to run crond in the foreground. This can be useful when starting it out of init. *** What first word "it" refers to in the text above? I'd replace the whole first sentence with: "Run in foreground." -p Cron permit any crontab, which user set. *** I don't understand what manpage is trying to say here. -x With this option is possible to set debug flags. *** How about just: " -x FLAG Set debug flag". Can I specify more than one flag?
This elaboration would be better from native speaker. But ok, I'll try to find someone who can look at it.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle. Changing version to '14'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
New version 1.4.6 contains rewritten man pages. Now it's in rawhide, but it will be in updates for F-13,14 soon.