[Nix-dev] Setting up crontab as nixos user

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

Ah right, in my user crontabs I set PATH.

On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 09:53:02PM +0200, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
> On 1 September 2014 08:10, Damien Cassou <damien.cassou at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > how can nixos users (not the nixos system, but simple users) specify
> > cron jobs? If a user writes:
> >
> > $ crontab -e
> >
> > then he is presented with a file that has this warning:
> >
> > DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
> 
> I installed NixOS (unstable) on a new machine just a few days ago.
> When I ran crontab -e, as a regular, I was presented with an empty
> file. What nixos version do you run?
> 
> > If the user modifies the file nonetheless, cron will never run the
> > added jobs. I tried with:
> >
> > */1 * * * * date >> /tmp/crontest.txt
> >
> > and the file crontest.txt never contains any date.
> 
> I noticed this too. It turns out that user cron runs with
> PATH=/usr/bin:/bin, so "date" cannot be found. There will be some
> output on stderr saying that the command cannot be found, but this
> output seems to only somewhere if using MAILTO. I hope running system
> cron with a (exported) PATH will propagate to user cron. I'll push
> if/when I've tested that it works.
> 
> > If the user creates its own crontab file and then registers it, it won't work:
> >
> > $ crontab /tmp/my.cron
> > cannot chdir(/var/cron), bailing out.
> > /var/cron: Permission denied
> 
> Never tried that.
> 
> Best regards,
> Bjørn Forsman
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