Subject: Bug#4316: cron -- crontab -l prints excess header

From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 11:15:51 -0400

Steve Greenland wrote:
> > Would you mind stripping these first three lines from the "crontab -l"
> > output?
> 
> Yes, because I think there is useful information there (primarily
> the second line, with the file name (usually) and date).

Could you write them to STDERR and the rest of the info to STDOUT?

> Since it's in a script anyway, why not strip it yourself:
> 
>  crontab -l |sed -e '1,/^# (Cron version/ d'
> 
> (actually "sed -e '1,3 d'" would proably be sufficient.)

I thought about this, but it requries my script to know about the
internals of crontab.  If crontab ever changed, then a problem could
arise.  I prefer to keep related functionality as together as possible.

> I'm going to close this one.

Hold on just a sec...  Let's resolve how this is going to be handled,
first.
                                             
                                          Brian
                                 ( [email-masked] )
                                             
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 the difference between theory and practice is less in theory than in practice

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From: Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 11:36:02 +0300

> Could you write them to STDERR and the rest of the info to STDOUT?

An option to suppress them might be better.

> arise.  I prefer to keep related functionality as together as possible.

I can't remember that I've seen the extra header for other cron's. That
means that the scripts need to be modified when moving them from or to
a Debian system. Not a good idea, generally.

I don't think doing "crontab -l > foo; crontab foo" should modify the
crontab. That's counter-intuitive.

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