OK so I'd like to run my crontab process as something other than root, say fetchmail. I set the fetchmailrc files to be owned by fetchmail, I run all my fetchmail invocations in crontab as fetchmail, and I get: //.fetchmail.pid: Permission denied fetchmail: lock creation failed I look at /var/run and see that group root has rw rights to it, so I add group root as additional group to fetchmail. Same results. QUESTION: What directory is fetchmail attempting to create fetchmail.pid?
Its in your home directory (one user running fetchmail shouldn't prevent another running it at the same time).