Re: crontab: Permission denied

["Monique Y. Herman" <monique@spam.bounceswoosh.org>]

orry, forgot to mention I'm running unstable ...

The permissions:
ls -l /usr/bin/crontab
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          27K Sep 17 18:18 /usr/bin/crontab
toadstool:~# ls -ld /var/spool/cron/crontabs/
drwx-wx--T    2 root     crontab      4.0K Sep 21 13:55
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/

I made the changes you suggested, and that allowed me to use the
crontab <filename>
syntax.  It installed a "monique" file in /var/spool/cron/crontabs , and
'crontab -l' does what is expected.

Oddly enough, though, using 'crontab -e' at this point opens up a temp
file, and when I try to save it it gives me .... permission errors
again!  Specifically, it tries to create /tmp/crontab.wVuFCM/crontab
(doesn't use the contents of crontabs/monique).

So now, it looks like I can create crontab entries with the filename
argument, which is better than nothing ... but I'd sure like to be able
to use 'crontab -e'!

Thank you for your suggestions!
--
monique

On Sunday, September 21 at  3:39 pm, Bob Proulx penned the following:
> Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> > Why can't my user run crontab?
> >
> > The system-wide cron is working fine; any cron-related files in /etc do
> > their jobs.  But every time I try to use the 'crontab' command as a
> > normal user, I get nastiness:
> >
> > crontab -e
> > crontabs/monique: Permission denied
> > [...]
> > crontabs/tmp.WAJKya: Permission denied
> > [...]
> > My permissions for /var/spool/cron/crontabs :
> > drwx-wx--T    2 root     crontab      4.0K Sep 21 13:17 cron/crontabs/
>
> What does this say for you?  Stock Debian:
>
> ll /usr/bin/crontab
> -rwsr-xr-x    1 root     root        22460 Oct  1  2001 /usr/bin/crontab
>
> ll -d /var/spool/cron/crontabs
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Sep 20 08:44 /var/spool/cron/crontabs
>
> Bob