cron/anacron: Schrödinger hits again
It appears that cron and/or anacron don't pass the $LANG variable onto
the programs they run. This impacts any program (such as rkhunter) that
include the name of the release in mailed output. Without
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /bin/mail will tag the contents of the mail as toxic
binary data and a mail reader trying to read the message will probably
refuse to touch the contents. For example, emacs-vm will only allow the
message to be saved to a file. It won't let you look at it directly.
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From: root(a)madbavarian.org (root)
To: root(a)madbavarian.org
Subject: rkhunter Daily Run on arbol.wsrcc.com
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 2013 03:35:09 -0700
So far I've just hacked it by including LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in both
/etc/crontab and /etc/anacrontab. I haven't done any long-term testing
to see what breaks with $LANG set for cron. Anyone know the reasoning
for cron and anacron clearing it? Seems a bit antisocial in the days of
UTF-8 being the common /etc/local.conf setting.
-wolfgang
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