the user `nobody` -why, what & who-

[hictio]

i have a crontab for a user, that i haven`t created, named "nobody", he has to update daily the updatedb for `locate`, now i don`t mind if i have to update that by hand or set a crontab as root to do the job; what really annoys me is that there is a crontab created by the system, that is not runing, maybe because of something i did.
where does the user "nobody" comes from? is it supouse to log daily?
any info will be much welcomed

[Bin_hex_2000]

Hello

User nobody is created during installation
this user is supposed to bave minimum privileges to perform certain tasks.

Notice that even when there is an account
in your passwd file "nobody", it does not
have password.



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I think, therefore I exist.

[mikek147]

One of the uses of the user 'nobody' is in anonymous ftp onto you system, the anonymous user takes on the identity of nobody. But nowhere on Linux or UNIX have I seen a crontab for the user nobody. What's the nobody crontab doing? -mk

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If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

[hictio]

thanks a lot for the super-ultra fast answers. the crontab for `nobody` is updating the updatedb every day at 4:4o hrs. in order to keep running `locate`.
as i said, i don`t mind updating that manually, or creating as root a new cronjob, what i don`t understand is why does it exists, and if perhaps i have disabled some service that the system expects `nobody` to take care.
thanks.

[mikek147]

'nobody takes care of nuthin', nobody, generally, has neither a shell or a home directory. As Bin_hex_2000 said, nobody has very limited privileges. -mk

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If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

[hictio]

so, that crontab, obviouslly, doesn`t do anything... i wonder how that task was created, besides the syntax of the cron job was badly written, an space missing.
anyhow, tanks for all the answers; i`ll see if i make a new cronjob for that, altough i preffer to exec the find program