Improve cron(8)

[Willem Jan Withagen]

On 2014-06-23 4:08, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> On 6/22/14 11:54 AM, John D. Hendrickson and Sara Darnell wrote:
>> Eitan Adler wrote:
>>> +arch since hackers@ seems to be silent.
>>>
>>> On 11 June 2014 23:56, Tomek Wałaszek <tmwalaszek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>> I saw on the FreeBSD Ideas page topic about cron :).
>>>> I've started updating the 'original' FreeBSD cron from sources to
>>>> vixi cron
>>>> 4.1. I think (well I hope :P) most of the features that were done in
>>>> FreeBSD cron are now ported into vixi cron 4.1, there are unfortunately
>>>> some missing features at the moment:
>>>> - @every_second - this need to be done
>>>> - -s and -o, in vixi cron 4.1 daylight time switches are enabled by
>>>> default, at the moment there is no -s and -o options. So you need to
>>>> remove
>>>> '-s' from the cron rc script
>>>>
>>>> I've also added one feature from OpenBSD, crontab is poking cron using
>>>> unix-domain socket so we don't need to have suid on crontab.
>>>>
>>>> Path is in the attachment. I'm testing it on my FreeBSD box and it
>>>> looks
>>>> good but anyway don't try it on production machines :).
>>>>
>>>> After the installation we have to do a few things:
>>>> - Add crontab group
>>>> - Change group to crontab on /var/cron/tabs
>>>> - Add sticky bit on /var/cron/tabs
>>>> - Add group write permissions on /var/cron/tabs
>>>>
>>>> This is still work in progress but if someone could have a look on
>>>> this and
>>>> give me some feedback it would be great.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Tomasz Walaszek


>>
>> you should up the version number or start your own renamed application

> Tomek, please don't let messages like this dissuade you from
> participating.  Please do continue this work, it seems very promising.
> Thank you!
>
> I was myself looking forward to having these additions.  Very cool.

Hi Tomek,

One of the things I like in some of the other cron's is the possibility 
to add files to something like: /var/cron.d.
This as contract to /var/cron/tabs, where files need to <username> and 
are executed under that users privilidges.

Reason that this would be convenient is that tools like puppet don't 
need to start editing files to remove crontab lines. Which IMHO is 
always more hairy then just adding/deleting/updating a file called:
	/var/cron.d/tool-ABC.cron

I looked around but that is not in Vixie cron, and could be frowned upon 
because of too much possible security pittfalls.

regards,
--WjW