Bashscripts.org

Hello guys

I googled myself up and down the whole internet about this thing without any working findings:

What I have: A bash script that is generating other bash script accoring to some input by the user. The same script writes a new cronjob into crontab for each generated script.

What I need: I need to delete a cronjob that contains a certain string (user input in variable)...

What I had so far:

sed -i '/$inputbyuser/ d' /etc/crontab #not working
crontab -l | [sed /$inputbyuser/d] #not working
...


Any Ideas how I can delete a line in crontab?
Thanks a lot in advance

hi,

I think he was trying to guess the syntax and used Tcl's.

By the way, you should check what the user input is before processing it.
What if it's « . » for example? It'll clear everything since it represents a character.

Tricky task, I know.

What about the following?



I think it suffices. It's not completely safe though.



EDIT:

Improved to keep dots.




EDIT (2):



I think it should be good now.

Thank you so much jsz. This works perfect.



Under normal circumstances I'd agree with you. Since the whole Software will be used by only 2-3 Sysadmins it's fine like it is. My security here is that I backup the crontab before making the changes to it. So there's a "crontab history". Besides that, the user will see his input again and has to verify it.

Maybe I have to elaborate what this project is. I've automated a Switch and Router Backupsystem through Rancid. The program collects all configs directely from the hardware and backs them up on a virtual Linux server. After that the backups will be transfered via scp to the actual data server. At the moment there are over 100 switches and router so I thought its easier to make a small script to apply changes, rather then set up folders / scripts and cronjobs by hand. My script creats all directories, creats custom scripts for the login procedure and makes a new cronjob for the script. Thanks to you within a few seconds the user is now able to move these various files to quarantine, even the cronjob will be written into a file before it gets extracted from the crontab. This quarantine deletes files after a certain age in days.

So thanks again for your help jsz as well as Watael.