root's crontab vs daily.local

[beavers]

Are there any "best practices" guidelines regarding whether to add reoccurring jobs to {daily|weekly|monthly}.local versus root's crontab? The local files all run from root's tab, so I'm not 100% sure why some jobs would need to be separated out into separate daily/weekly/etc files.

[ip6ix]

The /etc/{daily,weekly,monthly} scripts (which may include custom (.local) additions) are all concerned with system maintenance tasks. Commands run from cron(8) on the other hand, are more concerned with running tasks other than system maintenance related ones.

For example, my personal crontab(5) contains a command to run a reminder service at 2am. Root's crontab(5) runs the /etc/{daily,weekly,monthly} scripts and could be used to run system maintenance tasks especially if it was important for those tasks to be run at a specific time.

[jggimi]

I use daily.local(8) and weekly.local(8) scripts on production servers for maintenance tasks. Since the infrastructure to run them through cron(8) is already pre-existing, they are easier to manage than setting up separate cron() jobs.