Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 135845
several problems with "crontab -e"
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:13 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-AT; rv:1.4.3) Gecko/20040924 Description of problem: First look for "man crontab". If the cron.allow file exists, then you must be listed there in order to be allowed to use this command. If the cron.allow file does not exist but the cron.deny file does exist, then you must not be listed in the cron.deny file in order to use this command. If neither of these files exists, only the super user will be allowed to use this command. [root] # crontab -e You (root) are not allowed to use this program (crontab) See crontab(1) for more information After create /etc/cron.allow for user root it works. But the manual tells me that I do not need /etc/cron.allow. Put some lines in the user crontab over the command crontab -e and also comment lines and save it. At the next crontab -e you do not see the comment lines. If you want temorary disable a command with "#" then you can not activate it again with crontab -e You can only do this in the /var/spool/cron userfile. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vixie-cron-4.1-11 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. create an user cronjob with crontab -e, use comments 2. disable a command line temporary with "#" 3. Actual Results: crontab -e as root need other then the manual tells cron.allow comments in own job not possible Expected Results: crontab -e should work correct Additional info:
There is a new version of cron for RHEL-4: vixie-cron-4.1-18 This should be available from up2date/yum . 4.1-18 fixed the problems with /etc/cron.{allow,deny} and root not being able to run crontab -e . The comments issue will be fixed in the next version (4.1-19). It was caused by crontab assuming: /* ignore the top few comments since we probably put them there. */ ISC vixie-cron always adds default comments to every crontab file; a Red Hat patch stopped these default comments being generated, but crontab still assumes they are there and removes them. Well spotted!
This is now fixed in vixie-cron-4.1-19
The fixes in vixie-cron-4.1-19 works correct. Thanks.