Cron jobs are great, but it is very easy to forget what jobs are running, especially if you’re administering multiple cron tables on different servers. The solution is to add a crontab reminder job at the top of every cron table, which emails a listing of the cron table every month:

@monthly        : Crontab Reminder ; crontab -l

The colon is the no-op command, whose arguments describe the job for the email subject line. The ‘crontab -l’ lists the cron table for the current user. Cron displays the user and host on the subject line, so you will know which account is listed.

Subject: Cron <chuck@doublebrain> : Crontab Reminder ...

Now, every month you’ll get a reminder email about what jobs are running under each account. This will also serve as a monthly test of the accounts email settings.