"Cron" jobs? Questions/issues/errors...

[Cuddles]

Don't know much on this OS, but ever since I hard drive installed Knoppix, I've been getting root smail mail on a "cron" job, that appears to not have priviledges to do what it is doing, not sure how to view the job, what the job is, or why it is running...

Output from smail (root) mail:

You have new mail in /var/mail/root
root@Polaris:~# mail
Mail version 8.1.2 01/15/2001.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/root": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 root@Knoppix       Wed Apr 21 07:37   17/587   Anacron job 'cron.daily'
& t
Message 1:
From root@Knoppix Wed Apr 21 07:37:16 2004
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 07:37:16 -0500 (CDT)
From: root@Knoppix (Anacron)
To: root@Knoppix
Subject: Anacron job 'cron.daily'

/etc/cron.daily/smail:
expr: warning: unportable BRE: `^uid=0(root)': using `^' as the first character
of the basic regular expression is not portable; it is being ignored
checkerr:  ERROR:  you must be root to do this!

&

I have been (just) typing the messages out, and then just deleting them, but would like to correct, or at least figure out what, why, where, the job is doing, and possibly correct the problem, if I can...

Anyone have clues, ideas? (I had a heck of a time just figuring out how to "get" to this mail, in the first place, now, I am trying to resolve it)

Thanks to anyone for "getting" me clued in on this,
Cuddles

[baldyeti]

Funny thing is, I see the exact same error on my mepis box.
It appears /etc/cron.daily/smail invokes /usr/lib/smail/checkerr
The offending line seems to be the 65th, where expr is indeed used.
If you have no smail daemon running (no link under /etc/rc?.d
to /etc/init.d/smail), you can probably simply comment out the
checkerr invocation from the crontab script.
Otherwise, replace the offending line

if expr "`id`" : '^uid=0(root)' >/dev/null ; then

with

if [ "`id -u`" == "0" ] ; then

Cheers,

--bald