cron mystery

[Robin Becker]

Can anyone think of something that can stop cron working for a particular user?
I just noticed on one of our 6.1 machines the crontab for a particular user 
wasn't run properly since dec 21. There were hourly and daily jobs, but neither 
seemed to be running.

Looked in var/cron and see no deny or allow files. The user x had an proper crontab.

In the end I modified the users crontab and rewrote it

before
##################
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILTO=user

13 3 * * *      $HOME/bin/daily
19 * * * *      $HOME/bin/hourly


after
##################
SHELL=/bin/sh
MAILTO=user

13 3 * * *      /home/user/bin/daily
41 * * * *      /home/user/bin/hourly


and at 41 past the hour the hourly job came back.

Is it the HOME variable or the act of rewriting? User did have home defined in 
/etc/passwd.
-- 
Robin Becker