Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:27:51 +0200 From: "DA Forsyth" <iwrtech@iwr.ru.ac.za> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: re: how to simulate a user's crontab? Message-ID: <487F1097.31417.718F23E@iwrtech.iwr.ru.ac.za>
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> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:26:19 -0400
> From: John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com>
> I often run into permission problems with user crontabs. That is, a
> crontab run under a user's permissions.
> First of all, it seems to me that a user's crontab doesn't have
> exactly the same permission as the user himself. Is this true?
> If so, what permissions does a user's crontab have?
> Is there anyway I can simulate these permissions on the command line,
> so I can test things before putting them in a crontab?
> What I'd like to avoid is the frustrating cycle of putting a line in
> a user's crontab (a few minutes ahead), waiting for it to fire off,
> have it fail, check error logs, try again...
> It would be much simpler if I could simulate the crontab's
> environment, and just run the thing from the command line.
> Any hope? I'm running FreeBSD 6.3
John, it is not a permissions issue, but rather a path issue.
Do as the other poster suggested and run a cron job to dump the
environment and you will see that the PATH inside a cron job is very
rudimentary. Either add what you need to it in the crontab or cron
job, or always use absolute paths for everything in a cron entry.
alternatively, set up an AT job as the user, then find the script
generated by at and grab a copy (/var/spool/cron ???). You can use
that copy as the basis for all cron scripts for that user, and always
have the 'user' environment set up correctly.
--
DA Fo rsyth Network Supervisor
Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/
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