crontab root not found

[Jan Grant]

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Timms, Simon wrote:

> Hi,
> I seem to be having some trouble with cron.  I edited my crontab file and
> added a line then ran
>
> #crontab /etc/crontab
>
> Now my email box is full of "cron root not found".  Nonsense, I said, I am
> root and I'm right here, I then tried waving my hands so the computer could
> find me more easily.  Then it occurred to me that perhaps the contab file
> was being interpreted as a normal user crontab file and it was trying to run
> the command "root" as that is what appeared in the 6th column.  So I went
> and read the crontab man page and found that I should run crontab with the
> -u option when using su.  I tried that too and I'm still getting the e-mails
> every 5 minutes.  So what command should I run to load the master crontab?
> I tried
>
> #crontab -u root crontab
>
> but that too seems to interpret the crontab as a user crontab too.  I have
> removed any changes I made to the crontab so I won't bother including it in
> the e-mail since it is the default file.

/etc/crontab is not in the same format as a user's personal crontab file
(even root's). You don't need to reinstall /etc/crontab, because cron
will pick this up automatically. If you try, you'll find it
misinterpreting the sixth column (as is happening).

Either: just edit /etc/crontab, or: add a root crontab entry using
crontab -e.


-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
"Impact of vulnerability: Run code of an attacker's choice
 Maximum Severity Rating: Moderate" -- M$ security bulletin