How to stop a currently running cron job?

Question

How can I stop a cron job which is currently running?

Answer 1

You can do this the same way you'd stop any process.

To stop a currently running cron job, you can do one of the following:

pkill process-name

or if you know the PID (you can determine it by running ps):

kill 1234

(substituting the actual PID)

Answer 2

You can edit the cron table and comment out the task in question. Switch to the user that controls the task, export your editor of choice into the environment, then use crontab -l:

$ su - root
...
# EDITOR=vi; export EDITOR
# crontab -l

Answer 3

If you are using Redhat (RHEL)/Fedora Core/Cent OS Linux use the following command :

/etc/init.d/crond stop

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux the following command :

/etc/init.d/cron stop

P.S : You should be root to do these things