Home / ubuntu / Questions / 676368
In Process
Eaten by a Grue
Asked: 2015-09-21 09:37:47 +0800 CST

How can I find all the possible cron settings?

  • 772

I recently discovered that cron (at least on Ubuntu 14+) supports a setting called CONTENT_TYPE where I can specify the content type for emails like:

CONTENT_TYPE="text/html; charset=utf-8"

On another non-Ubuntu server I use the version does not support this. I looked at every man page I could find to no avail. Is there a way to find out all of the supported settings for a given version of cron?

cron

1 Answers

  1. It is mentioned in the man page, you just need to look at the right one.

    From man 5 crontab:

    By  default,  cron will send mail using the mail "Content-Type:" header
of "text/plain" with the "charset=" parameter  set  to  the  charmap  /
codeset  of the locale in which crond(8) is started up - ie. either the
default system locale, if no LC_* environment variables are set, or the
locale  specified  by  the LC_* environment variables ( see locale(7)).
You can use different character encodings for mailed cron job output by
setting  the  CONTENT_TYPE  and  CONTENT_TRANSFER_ENCODING variables in
crontabs, to the correct values of the mail headers of those names.

    Now you might ask how do i know which one to look at. Well, from man man :

    The table below shows the section numbers of the manual followed by the types of pages they contain.

       1   Executable programs or shell commands
   2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
   3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
   4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
   5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
   6   Games
   7   Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
   8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
   9   Kernel routines [Non standard]
    • 4