[TAG] Cron jobs for system users

[Thomas Adam]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 10:00:42AM -0800, Mike Orr wrote:
> 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

This works fine for me.

> "* * * * * 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?

No.  So I would repeat everything you have done above, and:

tail -f /var/log/syslogd

... and see what is reported there, since this is the file that all the
cron variants log to.

-- Thomas Adam

--  
I'm brutal, honest, and afraid of you.