crontab and user

[trumee]

Hi,
I want a cron job to run as a normal user and execute every 5 minutes. Instead of messing with the crontab file, i tried webmin to setup the cronjob. A file with my user name was created in /var/spool//cron/crontabs/trumee, which works fine if i do a 'run cron' manually from the webmin page.
However if i leave the system as it is, the cron job is not executed. I feel that the crontab files in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ is not getting recognised by the system and only /etc/crontab jobs are getting executed. So is there any way i can change the crontab file to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ . Or alternatively can i specify the command in /etc/crontab to be run as SPECIFIC user?

Thanks

[neilhwatson]

Is your cron daemon running?
Is your user account a member of the cron group?
_________________
The true guru is a teacher.
Neil Watson

[trumee]

cron daemon seems to be running
---------------------------------------------------------------
ps -ef |grep cron
root 1139 1 0 10:26 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/crond
root 24531 24528 0 19:22 pts/3 00:00:00 grep cron
-----------------------------------------------------------------

However the user is not a member of cron group, is that necessary?

[neilhwatson]

I believe so. This a security measure that prevents users from running cronjobs without authorization.
_________________
The true guru is a teacher.
Neil Watson