Editing crontab of non-root user from file Post: 302549169

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Editing crontab of non-root user from file Post 302549169 by nivedhitha on Monday 22nd of August 2011 04:46:11 AM

08-22-2011

Registered User

Editing crontab of non-root user from file

Hi All,

Ref: "build crontab from a text file" in same forum. (I am not allowed to post URL's in the first post)

We are reorganizing our UNIX Crontab file by first making changes in a word pad text file. The intent is to then copy it back to Crontab. Will this work? Copy and Paste does not seem to work.

From the crontab man page -

Code:

Code:

 
crontab [file] Create or replace your crontab file by copying the specified file, or standard input if file is omitted or - is specified as file , into the crontab directory, /var/spool/cron/crontabs. The name of your crontab file in the crontab directory is the same as your effective user name.

So, something like this:

Code:

Code:

cat mynotepadfile | crontab -mynotepadfile

will have to have ALL of the entries needed from the old crontab, because this wipes all of the lines in the existing crontab file.
-----------------------------

My script does many actions as root. A part of this script is to add a new crontab entry for a normal user.

I used this method and now need to transfer "mynotepadfile" to crontab of "myuser". But the method "crontab [file]" only works for the user invoking it. So this will edit root's crontab, but not someone else's. At the same time, the whole script cannot be executed as non-root.

How would the syntax "cat mynotepadfile | crontab -" change?

Thank you.

nivedhitha

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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

crond

CRON(8) 						      System Manager's Manual							   CRON(8)

NAME

       cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron)

SYNOPSIS

       cron

DESCRIPTION

       Cron should be started from /etc/rc or /etc/rc.local.  It will return immediately, so you don't need to start it with '&'.

       Cron searches /var/spool/cron for crontab files which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory.  Cron
       also searches for /etc/crontab and the files in the /etc/cron.d/ directory, which are in a different format (see  crontab(5)).	Cron  then
       wakes up every minute, examining all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the current minute.  When execut-
       ing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab,	if
       such exists).

       Additionally,  cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has,
       cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have changed.	Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab
       file is modified.  Note that the Crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.

SEE ALSO

       crontab(1), crontab(5)

AUTHOR

       Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com>

4th Berkeley Distribution					 20 December 1993							   CRON(8)

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