Who 'owns' my cron jobs?

[Gwaihir]

Just a quick question: when I enter a cron job into the system, under what user name + rights will it run? Is user+group myname+myname as I assume, or something different?

(I'm writing a little MySQL backup script and would like to set the password file as secure as possible.)

[jason]

It should run as your user and group.

--Jason

[Gwaihir]

Thanks Works like a charm.

For those wrestling with the same question, here's how I'm now making back-ups of my databases:

A shell script, database-dump.sh, makes the backups and puts them in my account-space:

#!/bin/sh
date=`date +%a`
cd /home/<username>/database-backup
nice mysqldump -A -f > backup-$date.sql
nice gzip -f *.sql
echo -n "Dump of all databases completed: "
date

Both the script and the backups are in the folder I made for those. The -A means it will make a dump of all databases your user has access to (and through the CPanel you can give one user access to all your own databases). The date stuff adds the day of the week to the name, so each backup "lives" for one week. This gives you time to correct a problem before it has corrupted all your backups too.

I don't want my password on that mysqldump line, as it would then show up in the server's process list too, so I use a .my.cnf file in my /home/<username> folder:

[mysqldump]
opt
user=<database-username>
password=<database-password>

As this file holds your password you'll want to lock it down as much as possible. I set the permissions on 700. opt is a little bonus that keeps MySQL memory use during the dump down a bit.

And then I call it with a cronjob (set from CPanel) that sends its output to a log file for me.

33 2 * * * /home/<username>/database-backup/database-dump.sh >> /home/<username>/log/cron 2>&1

The 33 2 * * * is a random time at a (probably) quiet hour.

Of course, to make it really useful, this assumes that you do regularly make backups of your account space in some way.

[gerilya]

Of course, to make it really useful, this assumes that you do regularly make backups of your account space in some way.

Once you take care of backing up DB data, you can use rsync to back up the whole site.

There is Windows binary of rsync available from Cygwin project.

[Gwaihir]

Right; that's exactly what I use. I'll leave it to you to write that part of the tutorial though.