changing permission of cron.allow and at.allow in HP-UX

[Lingaraja Patil]

Right now in HP-UX server cron and at.allow have 444 permissions. If we change it to 640, what will be the side effects???
And at.allow have bin:bin, but cron.allow is root:sys. Do can I change the owner and group of cron.allow to bin:bin??? OR it is ok in present ownership?

[Mridul Shrivastava]

It is not advisable to change the permission of these files. If any changes need to be made then please use crontab -e and if need to display the current jobs then use crontab -l.

I checked at my system and found that cron.allow and at.allow both have bin:bin so changing that won't affect.

However if you change the permission to 640 , some of the users won't be able to add cron job and may be some scheduled cronjobs added by them may not run at the time...

[Lingaraja Patil]

Mridal,
Means if permission changes to 640. Those who are in bin group, they can only run cronjobs. And the users who are not in bin group, but their name is in at.allow are not allowed. is it right?

[Bill Hassell]

It would not be advisable to control cron acces with permissions for the cron.allow file. No one except root can edit this file and you should not have any user listed in this file that should not be using cron.