RE: [tlug] Running an Exec file with Cron

["Charles Muller" <acmuller@example.com>]

Stephen wrote:

> I assume you're editing the crontab with "crontab -e", right?

Yes. I have been editing and using crontab in this way for a few weeks now,
and all was functioning OK, with the set of commands that I listed in my
prior post. That's why I felt confident enough to try to go to another level
of sophistication with it and try a couple of new things. I can see that a
part of the problem is that I tried to deal with a few different aspects of
this at once, and then when I ran into problems, couldn't readily isolate
possible causes.

> crontabs are kept in a spool area private to cron, and only root (ie,
> the suid crontab program) can put them there.

This also clarifies something that I needed to know, because I had read in
one of the explanatory pages that some systems allowed the regular user to
do crontab -e (and on my system, I can do it as regular user, and the file
saves as usual in /etc, but it doesn't seem to run).

So if I can only run crontab as SU, then I guess that I should just have to
settle with the fact that tarballs and copied files will all end up having
root permissions? If that's the case, no big deal, but this was something I
was not able to clarify from reading the literature.

Thanks,

Chuck