Proposed modifications to cron.

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From walton at LL-XN Thu Sep 10 04:51:30 1981
For the last several years we have been running a modified version of
cron, which we would like to see made a standard (we do not mind changes
to syntax: its the function we would like to see standardly available).
It happens that these changes handle any protection problem with cron.
The changes are:

1) After the time parameters, just before the command, in a crontab line,
   a user name is placed, and cron changes the real and effective user
   id's to those of the passwd entry for that user on the shell it starts
   to run the command.

2) The file /etc/crontab is replaced by the concatenation of the files
   /etc/crontab/*.cron.  This allows pieces of the cron tab to be
   assembled from different sources, and programs can in effect include
   part of the crontab as one of their files.  It was developed particularly
   for centralized maintenance of multiple UNIX sites.

3) A backslash just before a line ending carriage return caused the
   carriage return to be replaced by a space.  This got rid of some
   ridiculously long lines.

Actually, these changes were made to V6 cron, which happened to run under
V7 fine, so we never updated the V7 source, but will eventually, and would
be happy to do so quickly if there were widespread interest in making
this or any equivalent alternative more standard.