Re: crontab: Permission denied

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 03:39:37PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> 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

Stock which version of Debian? The scheme has been changed in unstable,
and the permissions match what Monique quoted. So, Monique, you should
probably change them back before upgrading lest it confuse something.

This is just a plain bug, and I see it on my laptop too. In fact, see
http://bugs.debian.org/210838. It looks as if cron 3.0pl1-81 will fix
it, so let's try ... yep, works for me. That package is available from
http://incoming.debian.org/ for now, and will be installed into unstable
proper tomorrow.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]