Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!mtxinu!unisoft!hoptoad!dasys1!jpr
From: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: su uucp in crontabs/root ?
Keywords: root uucp crontab su
Message-ID: <9449@dasys1.UUCP>
Date: 26 Apr 89 02:19:16 GMT
References: <75@norsat.UUCP>
Reply-To: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Organization: TANGENT
Lines: 56

In article <75@norsat.UUCP> dave@norsat.UUCP (Dave Binette) writes:
>Our SCO XENIX 2.3.1 installation of usenet news suggests installing lines
>such as 9,39 * * * * ulimit 5000; /bin/su -c "/usr/lib/uucp/uu...

     You mean    /bin/su uucp -c "usr/lib/uucp/uu..."     , don't you?
                         ^^^^

>Can anyone tell me why this 'su' is neccessary?

     These daemons should run as user 'uucp', not because 'root' is
     incapable of so doing, but because any resulting mail is from 'uucp',
     so presumably more meaningful, and all the various log entries also
     leave a better trail.

>The OS supports multiple crontabs:
>/usr/spool/cron/crontabs/root
>/usr/spool/cron/crontabs/uucp
>/usr/spool/cron/crontabs/news

    plus any others YOU wish.

>/usr/lib/cron/cron.allow which contains:
>root
>uucp
>news
    plus whatever YOU add.

>The new crontab is enabled with the command:
>crontab [filename]
>( I get strange behaviour if i just edit the crontab/uucp file without
>  submitting the changes via crontab {like it gets ignored} )

    The manual says exactly what it means. To have a different set of cron
    commands, "crontab newtable" is the command you need to execute, not any
    editing of an existing table.

    So many folks think cron is broken in SCO because they edit a crontable
    directly, and nothing seems to happen. Nothing does happen...

    Easy way to change your crontable:

	vi
	:0r !crontab -l		# read in existing crontable
	[ do your editing, in vi, to your heart's content; then: ]
	:%w !crontab		# submit vi's buffer to crontab
	:q!

    If you are root and you want to change uucp's crontable, then change the
    first line above to:

	su uucpmgr -c vi	# NOT uucp, you'd be running uucico
				# instead of uucpmgr's shell.
-- 
Jean-Pierre Radley		Honi soit		jpr@dasys1.UUCP
New York, New York		qui mal			...!hombre!jpradley!jpr
CIS: 76120,1341			y pense			...!hombre!trigere!jpr