How to disable everything in crontab -l?

Solution 1:

First, back up the crontab:

crontab -l > my_cron_backup.txt

Then you can empty it:

crontab -r

To restore:

crontab my_cron_backup.txt
crontab -l

Solution 2:

crontab -e then comment out each line you don't want to run with #.

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Solution 3:

Do you have root access? Just pause cron

sudo /etc/init.d/crond stop

Then restart it when you're ready

sudo /etc/init.d/crond start

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Solution 4:

If you are using vi as editor, then just enter :%s/^/#/ in command mode. In all lines (%), it substitutes (s///) the begin of line (^) with a hash (#).

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Solution 5:

Wasn't happy with the options above since they weren't one liners.

To disable crontab -l | perl -nle 's/^([^#])/# $1/;print' | crontab

To enable crontab -l | perl -nle 's/^#\s*([0-9*])/$1/;print' | crontab

usage example ( edited to show it doesn't disable comments)

$ crontab -l
# Comment
0 0 * * 0 /opt/something.sh

$ crontab -l|perl -nle 's/^([^#])/# $1/;print'|crontab
$ crontab -l
# Comment
# 0 0 * * 0 /opt/something.sh

$ crontab -l|perl -nle 's/^#\s*([0-9*])/$1/;print'|crontab
$ crontab -l
# Comment
0 0 * * 0 /opt/something.sh

Tested this on RHEL and AIX , and should work out of the box without anything needed to be installed