Antw: Re: [Wine]Running DOS program in a cron job

[Patrick Naef]

>Doesn't the cron job run as a root user (or member of the root group)?
>Certainly root owns the cron daemon, afaik.

You are right insofar as the cron daemon process is owned by root. However, when the cron daemon runs a job, it starts the the job's process with the privileges (and the environment, e.g. $HOME) of the user for whom the job was added. I added the job to a crontab file and submitted the crontab file to cron for a specific user, hence the job is not run as root, but as the user that the crontab file was submitted for.


>Secondly, under these circumstances (cron + ssh + wine + ttydrv + ?),
>who owns the terminal device in question? Perhaps here again is an

To clarify things: the cron job is supposed to run on a server machine, not my own workstation. ssh is only relevant in that I use it to remotely log in to the server.

I use ttydrv because when wine is run in the cron environment, there is no X11 display around that wine could connect to.

When I log in via ssh, there is also no X11 display available. If I can run wine manually within that ssh login shell, I conclude that the ttydrv approach is basically correct. The only reason why I mentioned the ssh thing was to point out this conclusion.


>Thirdly, what is the DOS program meant to do? Does it require input, or
>just generate output? If the former, does it have any kind of a silent
>mode in which it wouldn't need a terminal on which to display at all (in

My test program is a DOS batch file that contains a single line "@echo off", i.e. there is no input or output whatsoever. Of course, the final program would be something different, but for testing purposes this simple batch file should be enough.


Cheers
Patrick