misc/132135: [PATCH] etc/crontab: HOME setting overrides

[Craig Leres]

>Number:         132135
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       [PATCH] etc/crontab: HOME setting overrides
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Feb 26 19:30:00 UTC 2009
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Craig Leres
>Release:        FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE i386
>Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
>Environment:
	    FreeBSD hot.ee.lbl.gov 7.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE #1: Tue Jan
27 19:59:30 PST 2009
leres at hot.ee.lbl.gov:/usr/src/7.1-RELEASE/sys/amd64/compile/LBLSMP  amd64

>Description:
	For some reason, a line to set HOME was added to the default
	crontab back in revision 1.2 (back in July 1994!) This
	breaks any scripts or programs that use HOME to reference
	the home directory of the current account.

	I did a little investigation as to why this wasn't a problem
	in my older 6.2-RELEASE systems; it looks like there is
	some code to prevent HOME in the crontab from overriding
	the value derived from the passwd file that is not in the
	7.1-RELEASE version of cron.

	In the end, I checked with Paul Vixie and he said, "yes
	that's a bug in freebsd's default crontab."

>How-To-Repeat:
	Add a crontab entry similar to this:

	    * * * * * leres echo $USER HOME is $HOME

	and then wait for email that says:

	    leres HOME is /var/log

	which is clearly wrong.

>Fix:
	The attached patch removes the offending line.

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===================================================================
RCS file: RCS/crontab,v
retrieving revision 1.1
diff -u -r1.1 crontab
--- crontab	2009/02/26 19:03:36	1.1
+++ crontab	2009/02/26 19:03:39
@@ -4,7 +4,6 @@
 #
 SHELL=/bin/sh
 PATH=/etc:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
-HOME=/var/log
 #
 #minute	hour	mday	month	wday	who	command
 #

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