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Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:11:52 -0400
From: DAve <dave.list@pixelhammer.com>
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Subject: Running cron jobs as nobody
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Good morning all,

We have a cronjob we need to run as nobody from /etc/crontab and it 
seems to be not working. The job runs, but not as user nobody.

I noticed two things,

1) the job to update the locate DB runs as nobody, because the script 
uses su to become nobody.
echo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb | nice -5 su -fm nobody || rc=3

2) nobody, as expected, has no shell or home dir in /etc/password.

I searched around for an answer but didn't see anything concerning this 
other than a patch to cron to check if setuid fails.

Is setting the user to nobody in /etc/crontab not possible?

Thanks,

DAve

-- 
Don't tell me I'm driving the cart!