I am trying to determine if /etc/crontab is completely independant of roots cron job (if indeed root has a cron job..)

in other words /etc/crontab is called directly and automatically by crond therefore root can own its own crontab

If this assumption is correct, then can I also assume that making changes to /etc/crontab wil take effect by simply restarting crond?

Thanks

I'm not sure I understand the question.
All users on the RAQ can have their own cronjobs loaded into the cron table independently of the /etc/crontab/daily, hourly etc. entries.
It's a lot easier to visualise if you install Webmin (http://www.webmin.com) . You can then see all the cronjobs on the system, when they run and who 'owns' them

Actually, wkdwich, you are more or less correct.

The file /etc/crontab is the system level cron file that actually runs the jobs that blacknight is referring to (those inside /etc/cron/, e.g. /etc/cron/daily/ etc).

To modify this file you do not use the crontab command, but simply edit the file directly. To quote the cron man page "cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab file is modified", so there's no need to restart cron if you do change it.

In addition, as you mentioned, root (as a user) can have its own crontab file which you should edit through the crontab -e command. These files are stored in /var/spool/cron/

The following are your friends ;) :
man cron
man crontab

I was hoping this was correct.. now I can go and repair the damage that I created :blush: thank goodness nothing fatal, just annoying!!

Debbie