[Mailman-Users] Cron command?

[Mark Sapiro]

This thread is getting too convoluted for me to parse, but here's the
complete story:

There are two possible places where Mailman's crontab can be installed.
For purposes of discussion, assume the Mailman user on your server is
'mailman'.

- The crontab can be a user crontab in /var/spool/cron/mailman or maybe
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman. This can be installed by

sudo cp /path/to/mailman/cron/crontab.in /var/spool/cron/mailman

(or to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman after verifying the place) or
better because you don't need to know the destination

sudo crontab -u mailman < /path/to/mailman/cron/crontab.in

- the crontab can be a system crontab in /etc/cron.d/. The file name is
not important but is usually 'mailman' for documentation reasons.
Because these crontabs do not have a user context, the format is
different. There is an additional field between the days/times and the
command which is the user under which to run the command. Mailman's
cron/crontab.in (as distributed by the GNU Mailman project) does not
have this field. Thus, if you were to install
/path/to/mailman/cron/crontab.in directly in say /etc/cron.d/mailman you
would need to edit it to change lines like

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/MM/21/cron/checkdbs

to

0 8 * * * mailman /usr/bin/python -S /var/MM/21/cron/checkdbs

The important thing is there should be only one of these two possible
crontabs. It doesn't really matter which, but if you have both, you'll
run all the crons twice which will result in duplicate emails being sent
to users and list owners.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan