RHEL7: crontab can race during modification

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.5
  • cronie-1.4.11-17.el7

Issue

Even though crontab is modified, it will not apply with modification.

Resolution

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 EUS

Root Cause

  • If crontab is modified twice at the same second the crond reads it which means the timestamp will not change, the latest content will never be read.
  • Private bug 1638691 was filed.

There was a bug in cronie, fixed upstream by commit:

https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/commit/e91b6ebbef989cd167607e44f99424a3c0a8f24d

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