On Sun, Dec 08, 2024 at 11:19:52 +0100, Roger Price wrote: > With emacs I made a change to /etc/crontab on a Debian 11 workstation. I > have done this before successfully. After the change I ran > > systemctl restart cron && systemctl status cron > > But now the change doesn't take effect. > > I tried systemctl reload cron, but got the reply "Failed to reload > cron.service: Job type reload is not applicable for unit cron.service". > > What is the correct way to get cron to read the new crontab ?
Just saving the file is enough; you don't need to run a command afterward. What line did you add to /etc/crontab? Please paste it here. Note that /etc/crontab uses a different format than personal crontab files (there's an extra username field). On Sun, Dec 08, 2024 at 14:11:50 +0100, Roger Price wrote: > I rediscovered command EDITOR=emacs crontab -e and made my changes. > Command crontab -l shows the updated file. I'm waiting to see the result. > > Thanks for reminding me. Roger That command edits your personal crontab file, which has the shorter lines (no username field is needed, because all the jobs are run as you). I'm still suspecting you used the wrong format in one or both files, so it would be helpful to know what line you added to each of them, and why you were using /etc/crontab (system-wide) if your job was going to run as you. I'm not saying it's *wrong* to have all your system-wide and personal jobs in one place, but it's non-traditional.
