[capnchunky]

I'm running an OS X machine as a file server for several people in an office. There's a folder we use as a "common" area, where we want one user to be able to stick a file and have another modify it. The problem is that by default, OS X sets permissions of such files as writable by owner only. To get around that, I came up with the following for my crontab file:

0 * * * * echo password | sudo chmod -R 777 /ThatFolder/* > /dev/null

so that every hour, it'd fix the permissions on all files/folders within ThatFolder, and silence sudo's password prompt. Worked like a charm. But it wasn't triggering fast enough for users, so I decided to have it trigger every 10 minutes or so, did a little Google research, and came up with:

*/10 * * * * echo password | sudo chmod -R 777 /ThatFolder/* > /dev/null

It seemed to work. But next time I checked the admin's email, there was a flood of cron messages that just said "Password:", every 10 minutes. I tried changing the 10 to a 2, and that shut it up. 3 and 4 also worked fine. But setting it to */5 (or 0-59/5, makes no difference) or higher generates emails again.

I'm completely baffled. Anyone have any ideas?

[capuchin]

Are you using server or client? What version?

[capnchunky]

Whoops, sorry. Running 10.3.9 client, if that makes any difference.

[Bailey]

I think you are running into a couple differnet things. The reason it doesn't work over 5 minutes is that your sudo time period runs out and requires you to reauthenticate. I don't believe your command will actually work and that is why it asks for the password but when you run it under 5 minutes it resets the timeout period.

What you want to do is change your sudo command to include the -S option which tells it to read the password from stdin. This will work with the echo:

echo password | sudo -S cmd

Another option is to put the command in the root crontab if you want and then it will have the permissions. You can do this by calling 'sudo -s' and then setting the cronfile. You might want to be careful not to overwrite anything with this but you won't have to store your password in the cronfile.

Hope this helps.

[Tyler McAdams]

I would suggest Cronnix. It might be able to help you simplify the situation. If not you can always email the support (it's free)

http://www.abstracture.de/projects-en/cronnix/