[Techtalk] Troubleshooting cron

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 06:24:16AM -0700, Poppy wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 20:12, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > 0 and 7 both mean Sunday. For future reference, the crontab(5) man page
> > explains this, but you need to ensure you really do type 'man 5 crontab' or
> > else crontab(1) pops up and seems less useful.
> 
> Now that just seems silly... apart from crontab (5) being in the
> references for crontab (1), how would I ever have known to look there?
> *scratches her head*
> 
> Is there a reason for multiple man pages like this?

It does make sense in a twisted (or logical) sort of way. Man pages in
section 1 are for command that would be run (say, from a command line).
Section 5 is for file formats. Since there is both a file called crontab
(well, /etc/crontab) and a command called crontab, it gets two entries.
Further, a "well-bahaved" man page should have the references like
crontab(1) does so that you know where else to explore.

The complete list of sections is available in a number of places on the
web, e.g. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Man-Page.html. I thought it was
also inside a manual page somewhere, but I can't find it right now
(although 'man -k intro | grep "^intro" ' is a pretty good
approximation).

To see the manual pages from all sections matching the name you want,
try 'man -a <name>'. This will display each page in turn (using 'q' now
quits the current page and displays the next one if there are any more).

We now return you to your regularly scheduled crontab difficulties... :)

Cheers,
Malcolm