On your local computer you probably have a good idea of any cron jobs that have been setup. When you are working on a remote machine or server, know what cron jobs are in place can be useful. Here’s a way to find them all.
cat /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d: | xargs -I '{}' sudo crontab -u '{}' -l
Here is a breakdown of this command.
cat /etc/passwd concatenates the file to standard out. This output is piped to cut -f1 -d: which
removes (cuts) sections from each line of the input file. The -f1 flag indicates we only want the
first field from each line. The -d: indicates we want to delimit fields using the colon character.
The output from this command, a list of user IDs cut from /etc/passwd, is piped to xargs -I '{}'
which builds and executes commands (one per input value). The -I '{}' is the replacement string
used in the subsequent command, sudo crontab '{}' -l. The command lists the crontab for the user
passed in to xargs from the cut command.
The result of all of this is a list of all the crontab entries on the machine.