Linux and Python scripts, help needed

[Chris Gonnerman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ron Stephens" <rdsteph at earthlink.net>


> Hmmm, thanks for your comments. I just noticed that in my syslogs 
> there was an attempt to open /etc/news/inn.conf that failed. So I 
> just went in and chown 'ed that file to be owned by me rather than 
> root.

That's not the right solution; /etc/news/inn.conf should not be 
writable by "world".  You need to find out why/what tried to open it.

> I don't know if that is part of the problem. But in general, I 
> am finding that almost nothing I try to do with respect to running 
> Python scripts using crontab works at first, simply because of all 
> the permission stuff. So I change ownership and rights a lot. 

Bad sign.  Your crontab runs with your user credentials, so anything
you can do, it can do.  The problem here is usually environment
variables which are set differently.

> But I didn't even know that /etc/news/inn.conf was needed, and maybe 
> it isn't!

Shouldn't be, if you aren't calling inn as an external program.

> I wonder what else is needed but not owned or allowed by my 
> user? How does one ever get any real work done when unknown 
> permission and file ownership problems lurk under every hidden log 
> ;-))))

In general anything that works at your command line can be made to
work in your crontab.  Implement the logging as described in my 
previous post and see what happens.