schedule a script at "system startup"

Scott Mitchell scott+lists.freebsd at fishballoon.org
Sun Dec 4 03:17:07 PST 2005


On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 08:18:12PM -0500, Ian Lord wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to run a shell script at system startup which needs to 
> run under a specific uid...
> 
> I don't see anything for this in man cron...

Try 'man 5 crontab' - there's an @reboot string that can be used instead of
the normal time specification in a crontab file to have the command run
once at startup (of the cron daemon, presumably).

> is there a way to do it with cron ? or otherwise is there another way ?
> 
> I guess there might be a way to put a script in /etc/rd.d/ but I 
> don't know how to run it under a specifid uid

Your rc.d script could just use 'su' to switch to the desired user and
execute another script as that user:

	su - someuser -c /path/to/some/script

su passes everything after the username as arguments to the shell running
as someuser.

I guess the advantage of running your script out of /etc/rc.d is that you
can control when it gets run relative to all the other startup scripts -
'man rcorder' for details on this.

Cheers,

	Scott

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