Is cron a security risk?
3 Answers. If you have secured access to the script sufficiently and made sensible precautions, running something from roots crontab is not usually a security risk. But don’t run a script as root that a non root user can edit or overwrite. This applies to jobs run from cron as well as interactively.
Are cron commands user specific?
cron on *nix systems doesn’t require a user to login in order to run the jobs specified in a specific user’s crontab.
What user is cron?
Correct? That’s correct, if you run crontab -e it will execute as your user. Your scheduled cron jobs also run as your main user, but they don’t use the PATH settings that your user has. For that reason, we recommend that you use the full path to any executable that you run, eg use /usr/local/bin/python2.
When to use cron to escalate privilege?
By default, Cron runs as root when executing /etc/crontab, so any commands or scripts that are called by the crontab will also run as root. When a script executed by Cron is editable by unprivileged users, those unprivileged users can escalate their privilege by editing this script, and waiting for it to be executed by Cron under root privileges.
When to run a command in cron job?
To run a command every 5 minutes at 5 AM, starting at 5:10 AM. To run a command quarterly on the 1st day at 8 AM. To set a schedule for multiple jobs on a single cron job. To perform a certain task every time you start the system. Two files play an important role when it comes to cron jobs.
How does Cron report errors to the root user?
Cron usually reports errors or job messages via a mail to the root user (i.e. when a command returns an exit status != 0 or produces output to stdout/stderr) after the job is finished. Depending on your system you have to setup local mail delivery to get these messages. Thanks for contributing an answer to Unix & Linux Stack Exchange!
Why is my PHP script not running in Cron?
The cron daemon usually executes your command in a shell where the PATH environment variable is restricted to some system default, e.g. /usr/bin:/bin. Probably, your php command is not available in /usr/bin or /bin and thus the script fails when executed via cron and runs successful when not.