cron orphans

[Steven Stern]

On Thu, 13 May 2004 15:46:50 -0500, Jeff Vian <jvian10 at charter.net> wrote:

>
>Yes it is an error.
>You seem to be trying to create a crontab for a user that does not exist 
>in the passwd file. "crontab -e" tries to create a crontab for the 
>logged in user. Look in /var/spool/cron to see what users have crontabs, 
>as well as checking those with /etc/passwd for validity.
>
>Cron expects each user who has an *individual* crontab file to be in 
>/etc/passwd.  If your user does not have an account on the local machine 
>this may happen.
>
>"crontab -e" edits or creates a crontab file for the current user and if 
>that user does not have a local account it fails. It also fails if users 
>are not permitted to create crontab entries but AFAIK with a different 
>message.

Thanks.  I found and deleted these files in /var/spool/cron

-rw-r--r--  1 root root      0 Mar 28 22:52 tmp.15574
-rw-rw-r--  1 root sdstern   0 Apr 28 10:42 tmp.24677
-rw-rw-r--  1 root sdstern   0 May 12 08:35 tmp.26673

I don't know how they got there, but I'll keep an eye on it for a while.
--
   Steve