[TAG] Cron jobs for system users

[Mike Orr]

I tried to put a cron job in apache's crontab but it wouldn't run. 
The same job runs fine in my crontab or the main one.  Apache's shell
is set to /bin/false in /etc/passwd, but I put SHELL=/bin/sh and
HOME=/var/www in the crontab to override these, as the manpage said
was possible.  Still I couldn't get it to work, not even an entry like
"* * * * *   date >>/tmp/cron.out".  Finally I just put it in the main
crontab with su:  "su -c '/var/www/apps/a/bin/download-data' apache". 
That works although it makes for an ugly crontab.  cron.allow is set
to "all" and cron.deny is empty.  Is there anything else that would
prevent non-interactive users from having cron jobs?

I'm using fcron 2.0.2 on Gentoo.

--
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com>
(mso at oz.net address is semi-reliable)