I am having trouble using the "crontab" command on Tru64 5.1A. If I use
the vim (VI iMproved) editor, I get:
crontab: cannot create your crontab file in the crontab directory.
after editing the crontab (and the changes I made are not installed).
If I use /bin/vi, it works.
As far as I can tell, it appears that the crontab is over-reacting to a
security problem from a while back (where you could sym-link a file to
the /tmp/aaa... file that crontab creates for editing and see the
contents of any file on the system). Tracing the processes, it looks
like /bin/vi saves the changes to the file by truncating the existing
file and writing out new contents, while vim creates a new file and then
renames it (the vim way is better in the general case because if it gets
interrupted, no data is lost).
It looks like crontab does a stat() on the file before and after
editing, and if the inode is different, it rejects the changes. Instead
it should do an lstat to make sure the file isn't a symlink.
Does anyone know what I can do about this? Who at Compaq would I
contact for something like this?
--
Chris Adams <cmadams_at_hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 19:21:22 NZDT