What is the difference between the crontab located in /etc/crontab and the crontab that can be edited using crontab -e?
2 Answers
As Ignacio said, /etc/crontab is the system wide crontab.
The format of /etc/crontab is like this:
# m h dom mon dow user command
* * * * * someuser echo 'foo'while crontab -e is per user, it's worth mentioning with no -u argument the crontab command goes to the current users crontab. You can do crontab -e -u <username> to edit a specific users crontab.
Notice in a per user crontab there is no 'user' field.
# m h dom mon dow command
* * * * * echo 'foo'An aspect of crontabs that may be confusing is that root also has its own crontab. e.g. crontab -e -u root will not edit /etc/crontab See Configuring cron.
In most Linux distros, per user crontabs are typically stored in: /var/spool/cron/crontabs/<username> (vixie-cron).
RHEL based distributions are stored in /var/spool/cron/<username>. (cronie)
One is the system crontab and can only be edited by root, and the other is the user crontab and can be edited by a user and exists per user.
