crontab Daemon-from-Hell

[Robert J. Granvin]

>>	cd /usr/spool/uucppublic
>>	find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;
>
>This is dangerous if run as root.  If anything - disk error, anything - 
>happens to make /usr/spool/uucppublic unavailable, you will wipe your
>file structure.

??

/usr/spool/uucppublic is not a required nor integral part of the
system, filesystem, file structure or even UUCP.

Any directory, anywhere, given the proper permissions, can replace
/usr/spool/uucppublic, provided that the neighbor sites are aware of
it.  /usr/spool/uucppublic is a "publicly available" directory that
allows neighbor sites to deliver or retrieve files.  News and mail do
not travel through or use this directory.

/usr/spool/uucppublic was created so as to have a nice, central,
globally known "Standard" location for such file transfers.  You can
be generally assured that /usr/spool/uucppublic exists on any machine.

However, should it be gone, the worst that will happen is that the
remote machine will get an ACCESS DENIED message back from uucp on the
host machine.  No file system errors, no file structure destructions,
etc.  If you don't have uucp installed, you won't even have this
directory to start with.

/usr/spool/uucp, however, is more important, but again, has no effect
on the filesystem or file structure, if it were missing.

/ is more of an issue... :-)

> 3) Safest of all, and what I do - put this stuff in uucp's cron rather
>	than root's at all.  It's also OK to let the root cron entry do an
>	'su uucp' first.  

This is the way it is intended and supposed to be.  Never run things
from root that aren't necessary.  If your permissions and ownerships
are set correctly, root will not be necessary for cleaning up uucp.

-- 
________Robert J. Granvin________   INTERNET: rjg at sialis.mn.org
____National Computer Systems____   CONFUSED: rjg%sialis.mn.org at shamash.cdc.com
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