topic Re: Edit crontab rights for a user in Operating System - HP-UX

Edit Cron rights for a user

chindi — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 07:29:00 GMT

Hi ,

Is it possible that i can give rights for a user cron to be running in it .

But he must not be able to edit or add any new cron entries ?

O.S hpux 11iv3

Re: Edit crontab rights for a user

Dennis Handly — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:57:09 GMT

You might be able to allow a user, set up crontab and then remove.

I'm not sure if cron(1m) checks to see if disallowed, if the crontab entry exists.

It seems to work fine on 11.23.

Re: Edit Cron rights for a user

Ken Grabowski — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 18:10:45 GMT

If you just want a cron job to be run to execute a script or program under a given user ID, without allowing them to add or remove from cron, then you should set up the job under root and use "su useID -c script-or-command-to-execute". The root user owns the cron job and is the only one that can add, change, or delete the job. The job will be executed under the name user ID.

Re: Edit crontab rights for a user

chindi — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 06:19:49 GMT

Thanks Dennis ,

Tested it on 11.23 and 11.31 , it runs fine.

Re: Edit Cron rights for a user

Dennis Handly — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 08:18:49 GMT

>The job will be executed under the name user ID.

Hmm, I would think the job runs under root but switches to useID, so the cron mail would go to root.

Re: Edit Cron rights for a user

Ken Grabowski — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 11:28:34 GMT

Yes it would. That may or not be an issue, depending on their requirements. A well written job will included logging and email alerts/notification aimed at the appropriate individuals.

Cron doesn't give you much in the way of features. If your having to enable and then disable a cron user every time they need to add or remove a job, then you might as well own the process and provide a good script wrapped for the applications people to use. Thats what I've always done, even when a good cross platform job control system was avalable.