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Edit crontab for basic utilities in a business setting
Authored by: thornezilla on Feb 11, '05 06:49:08PM

Thanks for the correction -- yes, having plutil check the "~/Library" doesn't do a whole lot of good since it fails to check any of the users' Preferences directories. The system crontab is being run as root while the computers are either showing the login screen, or logged-in as various non-Admin users.

What our local UNIX guru pointed out to me is that running the plutil in this fashion doesn't do much good, as any failures are not visible to the users and generate no reports.

He suggests that I have any failures trigger an AppleScript that removes the offending plist files. At the very least, errors need to call a dialog box up to let the user know that there is a damaged pref file at location: "Users/xxxx/Library/Preferences/xxxx.plist".



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Edit crontab for basic utilities in a business setting
Authored by: DanFrakes on Feb 13, '05 02:05:39AM

"The system crontab is being run as root while the computers are either showing the login screen, or logged-in as various non-Admin users."

To be clear, the system crontab is *always* run as root -- even if an admin user is logged in.


"What our local UNIX guru pointed out to me is that running the plutil in this fashion doesn't do much good, as any failures are not visible to the users and generate no reports."

Right. You can mail the results or even pipe them to a text file on a server or to a particular account's Desktop. This way an admin or the user, respectively, could check the outputs for problems.



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