[lug] Automatic removal of cron job by cron script

[Hugh Brown]

karl horlen wrote:
> Thanks Mike and Ken
> 
> I should have thought of this.  Easy enough and fine
> for what I need to do.
> 
> Since this post is out there.  If anyone has
> suggestions for removing the job from cron, have at
> it.  I'm curious how it might be done.
> 

It depends on how you made cron aware of your script.

I have two modes that I like to use.  The first mode is to add a file to 
  one of the files in /etc/cron.{d,hourly,weekly,daily}.  If added that 
way, then it should suffice to remove it or to have sed comment out all 
the lines in the file.

The other way I've done it is to keep a file named crontab in ~/ and 
edit that.  When I'm done editing, I run crontab ~/crontab and my 
changes are active.  Again, to disable the cronjob, you'd run sed to 
comment out the line you didn't want.

If you don't keep a crontab file in ~/, you could do "crontab -l 
 >~/crontab" and then do as above.

Another consideration about putting alerts to the console, if you do it 
so fast and furious that you can't get logged in, you've defeated the 
purpose of the alert (and likely brought the system to its knees).

Hugh