Re: trouble with `at'

[Kevin Buhr <buhr@telus.net>]

Jerome BENOIT <jgmbenoit@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> 
> I have some touble with the `at' utility:
> when I launch
> 
> at -f myjob now
> 
> I get the message:
> 
> Cannot give away file: Permission denied

That's curious.  What version of the "at" package are you using?  Is
it 3.1.8-11?  This message means that either the "fchown" or the
"fchmod" call to change the ownership and execute permissions of the
job file that's stored in "/var/spool/cron/atjobs" returned an EACCES
error, but neither of those calls should return an EACCES error under
normal circumstances.

Double-check that your "at" binary and the "atjobs" directories have
the correct permissions:

# ls -ald /usr/bin/at /var/spool/cron/atjobs
-rwsr-xr-x    1 root     root        34488 Jan 18  2002 /usr/bin/at
drwx------    2 daemon   daemon       1024 May 14 14:29 /var/spool/cron/atjobs

Also, is your "/var" on an unusual filesystem, something besides
"ext2" or "ext3"?  Maybe NFS?

If it's ext2 or ext3, try "lsattr -a /var/spool/cron/atjobs".  There
shouldn't be any special attribute set, and the only file in the
directory---if no jobs are pending---should be ".SEQ".

# lsattr -a /var/spool/cron/atjobs
-------------- /var/spool/cron/atjobs/.
-------------- /var/spool/cron/atjobs/..
-------------- /var/spool/cron/atjobs/.SEQ

-- 
Kevin <buhr@telus.net>