Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!dewey
From: dewey@sequoia.UUCP (Dewey Henize)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sequent
Subject: Suggestions needed for crontab entry
Message-ID: <381@sequoia.UUCP>
Date: 12 Mar 89 02:34:15 GMT
Reply-To: dewey@sequoia.UUCP (Dewey Henize)
Organization: Home for Recalcitrant Hackers
Lines: 40


Hello all.  I'm the admin for a Sequent S81, DYNIX 3.0.12.  I have several
things that I need to run at fixed times with effective user IDs other than
root.  I'm having a lot of trouble with this, perhaps some of you out there
have addressed this and come up with better ideas than I have...

On other machines, I've been able to use a crontab line of the form:

15,30 4,8 * * * su uucp </usr/lib/uucp/cleanupstuff

but when I try that here nothing happens, although running as root I can
give the command 'su uucp </usr/lib/uucp/cleanupstuff' and it appears
to go ok.  Reading the man page it appeared that perhap the magic trick
was to use the '%' sign, like:

15,30 4,8 * * * su uucp % /usr/lib/uucp/cleanupstuff

but that didn't work.  What I'm using now, but am really uncomfortable with is:

15,30 4,8 * * * echo 'sh /usr/lib/uucp/cleanupstuff' | su uucp

mostly this seems to work.  There are times it doesn't seem to get executed
though, so I have a lot of doubts about it.

Obviously the ideal would be  a system that I've run into on Sun at release
4 and above.  Each user/id has its own crontab file, and cron automagically
uses that id when running command from the crontab entry.  (I'm told that
is a SYSV standard/enhancement, my experience in that area is minimal though.)

Please, if you have any useful workarounds on this post or send mail.  If  there
is a lot of interest and I get mail, I'll post a summary.

Dewey Henize
Execucom Systems

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|                   execu!dewey             Dewey Henize                      |
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