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Accepted
Nick Bolton
Asked: 2009-10-26 12:57:17 +0800 CST

What could cause "Permission denied" for command `crontab -e`?

  • 772

Here's some output that I hope is helpful:

nick@home-sv-1:~$ crontab -e
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/nick: Permission denied

nick@home-sv-1:~$ echo $EDITOR
emacs

nick@home-sv-1:~$ ls /var/spool/cron/crontabs
ls: cannot open directory /var/spool/cron/crontabs: Permission denied

nick@home-sv-1:~$ sudo ls -al /var/spool/cron/crontabs
total 12
drwx-wx--T 2 root crontab 4096 2009-10-25 20:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    4096 2009-05-18 01:19 ..
-rw------- 1 root root     612 2009-10-25 01:20 root

Problem:

Crontab does not have setguid, and is not in the crontab group.

home-sv-1:~# ls -al /usr/bin/crontab
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32048 2009-08-30 03:34 /usr/bin/crontab

Solution:

As root...

home-sv-1:~# chown root.crontab /usr/bin/crontab
home-sv-1:~# chmod g+s /usr/bin/crontab

home-sv-1:~# ls -al /usr/bin/crontab
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root crontab 32048 2009-08-30 03:34 /usr/bin/crontab
cron

4 Answers

  1. Also it's worth checking out the permissions at /var/spool/cron/crontabs by

    ls -al /var/spool/cron/crontabs

    In my case doing this showed that actually the user assigned to the crontab was 'whoopsie' which I assume means there was some error in setting up the user.

    Performing...

    chown <username> /var/spool/cron/crontabs/<username>

    Fixed this completely :)

    • 20
  2. Best Answer

    Does /usr/bin/crontab have the setgid permission set?

    -rwxr-sr-x 1 root crontab 32K 2008-09-28 14:07 /usr/bin/crontab*

    If not, chmod g+s it (and if needed, chown before that)

    Edit: Note that this only applies to Vixie Cron (used by most distros); other daemons (such as dcron) may use different permissions (setuid).

    • 14

  3. I had the same problem. I solved it this way.

    sudo crontab -u yourUser -e

    I hope it helps you.

    • 7

  4. Check for an /etc/cron.allow and /etc/cron.deny file. If those files exist, make sure your user name is in /etc/cron.allow.

    • 1