Re: some evil process keeps chmoding my $HOME

[Andrew Schulman <andrex@alumni.utexas.net>]

> I've found a every annoying problem recently that my $HOME occasionly
> chmod'ed to 777 by some process. My ~/.authorized_keys does not work
> properly with mode 777 of $HOME, but I cannot find which process did
> the evil thing. I've set up a crontab to "chmod 755 $HOME" every 5
> min, but I think there would be a clean way to do it.

This sounds like a battle of the cron jobs.  Every now and then the evil 
cron job wins for a while, until the good one catches up.

You could hunt through /etc/cron*, and if there aren't too many files 
there you might identify the offender.  For a more methodical approach, 
try one of the various file monitoring utilities: fam, fwatch, or gamin.

Good luck,
Andrew.