Whenever cron runs a script, it becomes the owner of that script. nobody has lots of restrictions on it, but it has some advantages in that it is allowed to do some things that a normal user can not do and it can also do things that cron can not do also.

I've made a script which cron runs every few hours. the script is suppose to make a few changes to my home directory. The problem is that the script can not change my home directory because it is run as owned by cron whenever cron runs it.

Is there a way I can get cron to run the script as "nobody" since nobody can actually make changes to my home directory but cron can not.

I do not own the server with my home directory and I do not have any root access. On this server, scripts can not change owners or groups either. So my only option is to get cron to run the script as "nobody" some how without changing the owner of the script. Is there a way to do this?

Strange behaviour! What OS is running on the server? If users are able to edit their own crontab, their cron jobs own to themselves. I have experience with crontab on a lot of OS (SUN, Linux, SuperUX) and the behaviour was exactly the same.

The server is a Red Hat Enterprise server. I think the administrator restricted all cron jobs to only a few permissions. I should have mentioned that this is a shared hosting server so there are many other users on the system who has the potential to get into other users directories. I think that is the reason why cron has so much restrictions on it. Well, I guess I need a better host, or I should just make my own..

From the man page of crontab...

So, it looks like there is no chance of changing the owner of the cron jobs. This is reasonable from a security point-of-view. If the system administrator does not let the users to own their cron jobs, I think you have no chance.