how to simulate a user's crontab?

[DA Forsyth]

> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:26:19 -0400
> From: John Almberg <jalmberg at identry.com>

> I often run into permission problems with user crontabs. That is, a 
> crontab run under a user's permissions.

> First of all, it seems to me that a user's crontab doesn't have 
> exactly the same permission as the user himself. Is this true? 

> If so, what permissions does a user's crontab have?

> Is there anyway I can simulate these permissions on the command line, 
> so I can test things before putting them in a crontab? 

> What I'd like to avoid is the frustrating cycle of putting a line in 
> a user's crontab (a few minutes ahead), waiting for it to fire off, 
> have it fail, check error logs, try again... 

> It would be much simpler if I could simulate the crontab's 
> environment, and just run the thing from the command line. 

> Any hope? I'm running FreeBSD 6.3

John, it is not a permissions issue, but rather a path issue.
Do as the other poster suggested and run a cron job to dump the 
environment and you will see that the PATH inside a cron job is very 
rudimentary.  Either add what you need to it in the crontab or cron 
job, or always use absolute paths for everything in a cron entry.

alternatively, set up an AT job as the user, then find the script 
generated by at and grab a copy (/var/spool/cron ???).  You can use 
that copy as the basis for all cron scripts for that user, and always 
have the 'user' environment set up correctly.


--
       DA Fo rsyth            Network Supervisor
Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/