I have a small number of logins on my gentoo box that I use for automated chores. I would prefer that they never have passwords, since they are run solely by cron jobs. However, if the login is locked then cron will no longer run the jobs -- I presume (without knowing for sure) that it's because of the warning messages that are issued when you 'su' into such a login.
These logins are data gatherers for me, that send emails to other automated systems to get information. They process the answers in various ways for later harvesting by other automated processes. As it is, I have assigned passwords to these accounts, but as I said, I'd prefer not to. SO: is there a way to get cron(1) to run jobs for an account whose password is disabled? Perhaps by doing something to the shadow file that passwd(1) would not do? ++ kevin -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
