1Newsgroups: comp.sources.unix 2From: paul@vix.com (Paul Vixie) 3Subject: v27i196: vixie-cron - Vixie's Cron, V3.0, Part01/02 4Message-id: <1.758778125.12895@gw.home.vix.com> 5Sender: unix-sources-moderator@gw.home.vix.com 6Approved: vixie@gw.home.vix.com 7 8Submitted-By: paul@vix.com (Paul Vixie) 9Posting-Number: Volume 27, Issue 196 10Archive-Name: vixie-cron/part01 11 12This is version 3.0 of vixie-cron. Previous versions are contained in 13BSD/386, NetBSD, FreeBSD, 386BSD, Linux, and thousands of Usenet systems 14where the local sysadmin has replaced the vendor's cron with this one. It is 15essential that all systems using any previous version of this cron be 16upgraded, since there are three major security holes in all previous 17versions. (Two of the security holes have been well-publicized; one has 18not; the Linux/NetBSD fix for one of the publicized security holes actually 19adds a new hole, so even those systems ought to be upgraded to this cron.) 20 21The other major difference between this and previous versions is that this one 22has support for the 4.3BSD-style "/etc/crontab" file -- that's the one that has 23an extra field between the time specification and the command; that field is a 24user name. Thus commands can be made to run as non-root users without the old 25"* * * * * echo /usr/bin/rnews -U | su news" trick. The support for this was 26done by BSDi and contributed back to the public version of cron. 27 28I have run an extensive beta test of this software using the alt.sources group; 29this version of cron is known to compile and run on *BSD*, Linux, SunOS, OSF/1, 30HP-UX, and several flavours of System V including the one running on Convex's 31hardware. I have run it in production here for many months, and it is part of 32the upcoming 1.1 release of BSDi's BSD/386 operating system. 33 34Briefly, this cron is better than the older BSD/V7 cron since it permits each 35user on the system to have their own private crontab. It also logs each command 36as it is run (using syslog or a local log file, depending on how you configure 37it). It does not contain "atrun" as does System V cron, and since those 38systems do not have a separate "atrun" that this cron can run, it is unlikely 39that any System V system will want to run this cron. 40 41This cron complies with POSIX 1003.1. Actually, this cron predates POSIX 421003.1's specification by a several years, but since the interface for this 43cron and POSIX's cron are both based on AT&T System V's cron, the differences 44were small and this latest version has been changed to the POSIX interface 45where they differed. 46 47 Paul Vixie 48 paul@vix.com 49 50