Hope someone can help me out here.
I've written a python script that I want to run under CRON every 5 minutes. In keeping with the general security practice of least privilege, I:
- created a user "custom" to use for custom scripts
- created a group "custom" (don't want anything ruing under nobody to have access) and;
- put the script (monitor) in /home/custom/bin
The shebang in the script is:
#!/usr/bin/env python2.7
The only permission given to user custom is:
Inherited from Name Description Action
User - System: Shell account access Indicates whether the user is able to login for example via SSH.
Ruing the script with the command /home/custom/bin/monitor from the command line works regardless of the current working directory.
I tried doing cd / first to make sure it wasn't a path issue, and the script ran correctly.
The script writes 2 files on the first run, and subsequent runs append to those files in the directory /home/custom/bin/mondata
I installed the CRON package and created the following entry:
*/5 * * * * custom /home/custom/bin/monitor
(There doesn't seem to be an "Apply Changes", so I'm assuming that I don't need to reboot or do anything to load the changes.) (The above entry and many others are displayed in the WebGUI, and I know that several of those other cron jobs are ruing.)
After waiting for enough time for the script to run, I checked for output and there was nothing.
Changing custom to root for testing purposes (Just in case the issue was a permission problem) doesn't fix the problem.
Here are the relevant file permissions:
[2.3.2-RELEASE][custom@local]/home/custom/bin: ls -laR ~
total 52
drwxr-xr-x 4 custom nobody 512 Aug 7 00:14 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Jul 27 15:24 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 custom custom 512 Aug 7 00:14 bin
/home/custom/bin:
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 3 custom custom 512 Aug 7 00:14 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 custom nobody 512 Aug 7 00:14 ..
drwxrwx--- 2 custom custom 512 Aug 7 00:07 mondata <-Script output goes here
-rwxr-xr-x 1 custom custom 4663 Aug 5 22:44 monitor <-The script
/home/custom/bin/mondata:
total 8
drwxrwx--- 2 custom custom 512 Aug 7 00:07 . <-NO OUTPUT! (I deleted the files manually after successful tests)
drwxr-xr-x 3 custom custom 512 Aug 7 00:14 ..
I checked for an error message in: Status / System / Logs / System / General - Nothing found.
I even tried temporarily changing the permissions on /home/custom/bin/mondata to 777 and setting the cron user to root (totally unacceptable security practice just for testing, but even that didn't work.)
I have no way of knowing if the script is ruing and the file writes are being denied for some reason, or if the script isn't ruing at all.
BTW, where is the cron tab? When I run crontab -l as root, I get crontab: no crontab for root, but I KNOW cron jobs are ruing. (I have the daily mail report ruing.)
Any suggestions - even for troubleshooting to know if the script is ruing would be helpful.
Thanks.