cron problem

[Natanael Copa]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 15:27 -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Friday 25 August 2006 9:15 am, Natanael Copa wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a problem that I need an advice to solve.
> >
> > My alpinelinux project is run from RAM. The idea is, if you need
> > persisten /var, you need a disk. Only /etc is backed up since all system
> > configuration goes there.
> >
> > Now, as a part of the system configuration, a user might want to add
> > custom cronjobs. In a debian system he can put stuff in /etc/cron.d
> > or /etc/crontab or /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly}.
> >
> > But with busybox crond its impossible to implement something like that,
> > without depending on /var/spool/cron/crontabs.
> ...
> > So what do you suggest?
> 
> A symlink?

My first thought was to create a symblink:
  
  /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root -> /etc/crontab

But "crontab -e" will overwrite the link and not the target. (at least
my test did that)

Right now the best solution seems to be start crond with -c /etc/crontab
as mentioned here before or maybe create a link to the dir:

  /var/spool/cron/crontabs -> /etc/crontabs

I have a system that automatically keep track of changes in /etc (to
make backup of system configs) using sfic (http://sfic.sf.net). When a
user changes the crontab (with crontab -e) there will be created a
cron.update file in this dir. If the user does a backup of configs
before cron reaches to delete it, it will be included in the backup,
which is not what I want.

I don't want any temp files in /etc. I want to have them in /var
or /tmp.

And right now, support for multiple users to create cron jobs is bloat
for me. An ucrond applet that only uses /etc/crontab would be perfect.

--
Natanael Copa