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by unavailable accounts, e.g., those locked, expired, not allowed in at
the moment by nologin(5), or whatever, depending on cron's pam.conf(5).
This applies to personal crontabs only, /etc/crontab is unaffected.
In other words, now the account management policy will apply to
commands scheduled by users via crontab(1) so that a user can no
longer use cron(8) to set up a delayed backdoor and run commands
during periods when the admin doesn't want him to.
The PAM check is done just before running a command, not when loading
a crontab, because accounts can get locked, expired, and re-enabled
any time with no changes to their crontabs. E.g., imagine that you
provide a system with payed access, or better a cluster of such
systems with centralized account management via PAM. When a user
pays for some days of access, you set his expire field respectively.
If the account expires before its owner pays more, its crontab
commands won't run until the next payment is made. Then it'll be
enough to set the expire field in future for the commands to run
again. And so on.
Document this change in the cron(8) manpage, which includes adding
a FILES section and touching the document date.
X-Security: should benefit as users have access to cron(8) by default
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