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I have a list of jobs in the crontabs for user1, user2. I want to prevent the jobs of user2 from running.

I tried listing user2 in cron.deny, but that only prevents him from accessing his crontab. The jobs listed in user2's crontab still get executed.

How do I disable cron jobs for a specific user?

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2 Answers

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Brute force!

crontab -u fred -e
%s/^/#/
:wq

There's probably a more elegant way to do it, but unless you are doing this all the time, use the hammer you have.

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I was doing it the same way. Was wondering if cron should have this feature integrated. – NOLFXceptMe Jan 20 at 9:25
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crontab -r username works on Solaris to remove the crontab for a given username.

If -r doesn't work for you, then try:

su username 'sh -c "crontab /dev/null"'

Quicker to type and easier to script than crontab -e.

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The problem with this is that it destroys the user's information, which you probably shouldn't do unless you're dealing with a hostile user (and perhaps not even then). The other answer just comments out the user's crontab, which strikes me as a better idea. – Keith Thompson Feb 13 at 5:32
As @KeithThompson says, I do not want to erase the crontab for that user. I just want to disable it. The use case is such that I'd like to enable it later. – NOLFXceptMe Feb 13 at 20:51
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