format of /etc/crontab?

[Lowell Gilbert]

rdm at cfcl.com (Rich Morin) writes:

> The cron(8) man page (on my FreeBSD 4.7 system) says:
> 
>     Cron searches /var/cron/tabs for crontab files which are named after
>     accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory.  Cron
>     also searches for /etc/crontab which is in a different format (see
>     crontab(5)).
> 
> The crontab(5) man page, however, says nothing about any differences in
> the file formats.  Instead, it appears to describe only the format that
> is used in /var/cron/tabs/* files.
> 
> I would like to know precisely how the format of /etc/crontab differs,
> but I can't find any man page that addresses this.  Help?

It does, actually:

    The format of a cron command is very much the V7 standard, with a number
     of upward-compatible extensions.  Each line has five time and date
     fields, followed by a user name (with optional ``:<group>'' and
     ``/<login-class>'' suffixes) if this is the system crontab file, followed
     by a command. 
 
In other words, the difference is whether there is a user name
specified just before the command to be executed