RE: [Pyatcron-devel-list] Got root?

[Childers, Matthew]

>Hey, just doing some thinking and wondering how we're going to write
the crontab files. They're stored in >/var/spool/cron which is, by
default, only readable/writeable by root. So, we're either going to have
to do it >through pam or sudo or something.
>
>Also, the files themselves insist that you shouldn't write to them
directly, saying that you must edit the master >first. This is normally
done by crontab -e, writing out the file, and then when it is saved, it
is installed >automagically. How do we do that? 

I just did a little research on cron and found this: it looks like all
crontab does is check your syntax so you aren't installing bad crontabs.
>From what I can tell when cron loads it looks in /var/spool/cron for
crontabs of users in /etc/passwd.  Then it also looks for /etc/crontab.
It will look for mod times on it's spool directory and /etc/crontab
every minute, and if one has been modified, then it will reload all
crontabs.  So I tried updating my crontab in /var/spool/cron, as root,
and sure enough it worked.  So it looks like all we will have to do is
edit the /var/spool/cron directly (once we figure out the permissions
problem), and it should work.