Troubleshooting • crontabs/pi/: fdopen: Permission denied

At my wits end on this one.

Trying to edit the crontab for a normal user and getting "crontabs/pi/: fdopen: Permission denied". Works fine with sudo

RPiOS Bookworm 64 bit booting to command line.

CM4 1GB (but I doubt that's relevant)

PWD was the user's home directory and there is no subdirectory "crontabs/pi" and there shouldn't be. There is also no /var/spool/cron/crontabs/pi.

One thing I did notice was the the group for /var/spool/cron and the crontab binary was being shown as "systemd-timesync" and not "crontab".

Looking at /etc/group shows crontab as 108 instead of 101 (as it is on trixie) and systemd-timesync as 101 instead of 997.

I suspect that happened when I restored a previous /etc/group when rebuilding that system.*

I've set the group correctly on the crontab binary and the directories but the error still happens.

Any ideas why these group IDs would be different?

Any suggestions? Or should I bite the bullet and rebuild this from scratch again? The system appears to be working correctly apart from this.

*: I've a horrible feeling that the restored group file might have come from a Bullseye install.

Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sat Jan 03, 2026 3:05 pm

---