Command to ON/OFF cron job

Question

Is there any command that can switch ON/OFF cron job in Ubuntu?

As far I know to open crontab -e and comment out each cron job. Is there any single command to stop all cron job and restart later?

Currently I have multiple cron jobs running on different time to send email alerts, monitoring results, automatic DB update(hourly), weekly status etc

But then during maintenance time, I need to stop all these cron jobs and restart once maintenance is over. Now disabling one by one with # symbol.

Is there any solution?

Solution

For the single cron job you can comment by editing with crontab -e.

If you have to stop all the cron jobs:

sudo service crond stop
sudo service crond status
sudo service crond restart

or

/etc/init.d/cron start
/etc/init.d/cron status
/etc/init.d/cron restart

or

sudo systemctl stop cron
sudo systemctl status cron
sudo systemctl restart cron

Comments

[hlongmore]

Or, use cron instead of crond in the first example (at least, that's what I had to do).