When a cron job runs with what privilege does it execute?
I'm not sure about that. Is it with the same privileges of the user that added it via crontab -e
?
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Sign up to join this communityWhen a cron job runs with what privilege does it execute?
I'm not sure about that. Is it with the same privileges of the user that added it via crontab -e
?
You can specify a user in the system crontab entries like so:
# For details see man 4 crontabs
# Example of job definition:
.---------------- minute (0 - 59)
| .------------- hour (0 - 23)
| | .---------- day of month (1 - 31)
| | | .------- month (1 - 12) OR jan,feb,mar,apr ...
| | | | .---- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0 or 7) OR sun,mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
| | | | |
* * * * * user-name command to be executed
The 6th argument can be a username. Additionally you can put scripts in the /etc/cron.d
directory. The scripts take the same form as the crontab entries described above, for example:
# /etc/cron.d/clamav-update
## Adjust this line...
MAILTO=root
## It is ok to execute it as root; freshclam drops privileges and becomes
## user 'clamav' as soon as possible
0 */3 * * * root /usr/share/clamav/freshclam-sleep
You can put scripts in these directories, but they're meant to be run as root:
Finally you can create user based crontab entries by running this command as a given user:
$ crontab -e
These entries are stored in files with the same name as the user in this directory, /var/spool/cron/
:
$ sudo ls -l /var/spool/cron/
-rw------- 1 saml root 0 Jun 6 06:43 saml
Yes, however, jobs that are added manually to the systems crontab (edit /etc/crontab) will be run with absolute permissions (ie: run as root) unless you specify another user.