Crontab entries

[Dan Coutu]

Paul Lussier wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Is there a requirement to place parens around a set of commands
> delimeted by a ';' for crontab entries?
>
> At some point I got in the habit of creating entries like:
>
> 30 02 * * * (foo;bar;baz)
>
> But nowhere can I find documentation even mentioning the use of
> parens. Of course, I haven't even seen mention of having cron exec'ing
> multiple commands either...
>
> Using the parens definitely works, I'm just trying to figure where I
> picked up that habit...
>
> Thanks,
>   
You picked up that old habit because the shell runs the set of commands 
within parentheses as a subprocess. This insures that the group of 
commands within the parens are run within the same context.

Dan