Support specifying an absolute path (typically /etc/crontab) rather than
a path relative to /etc/cron.d, to allow modifying the main system crontab.
Particularly useful for target systems that have /etc/crontab but no
/etc/cron.d.
I have a task like this in a playbook. The ansible_ssh_user is 'root'
for this host.
- cron:
hour: 00
job: /home/backup/backup.sh
name: baserock.org data backup
user: backup
Running it gave me the following error:
TASK: [backup cron job, runs every day at midnight] ***************************
failed: [baserock-backup1] => {"failed": true}
msg: crontab: can't open '/tmp/crontabvVjoZe': Permission denied
crontab: user backup cannot read /tmp/crontabvVjoZe
The temporary file created by the 'cron' module is created with the
Python tempfile.mkstemp() function. This creates a file that is readable
only by 'root' (mode 600). The Busybox `crontab` program then checks if
the file is readable by the 'backup' user, and fails if it isn't. So we
need to make sure the file is world-readable before running `crontab`.
