On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 10:01, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 09:41, you wrote: > > On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 10:43, Mike Beattie wrote: > > > Why not use your user crontab? > > > > > > /etc/crontab should really only be used for system maintenance tasks... > > > > Why is that? > > > > I have up to 12 lines in one machine's /etc/crontab... they're doing a > > variety of things from log processing to doing a daily backup to more > > log processing, which *could* be done as non-root I suppose. > > > > But I think having it all in one file is easier. > > > > Comments? > "Never run processes as root unless you actually need to" is a very good > general rule for 'safe computing'. Putting lines in /etc/crontab... which do > not _need_ those root priviliges transgresses that general rule.
Hence my comment "which *could* be done as non-root" For example... I don't want a non-root user to have read access to my directories for backups... but it doesn't require root. Also, I don't think log files should be world-readable, for privacy reasons.
