There is no "correct" id for system users and groups, beyond the first 100 provided by base-passwd. The numbers the rest get will depend on the order packages were originally installed, so they are not guaranteed even within the same release.
Reinstalling cron-daemon-common and cron should chown /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ and /usr/bin/crontab according to your current databases. When you tried this yourself, did you accidentally lose the set-group-id bit on the binary?
A missing setgid bit on the crontab binary seems to have been the problem. Adding that has got rid of that error. Thanks.
You should probably also reinstall other packages that relate to users and groups in the range 101…999.
Even though that now appears to be fixed I don't know what else I managed to break so it's going to be reinstall from scratch without attempting to shortcut things by copying in the backed up /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group. I was hoping to avoid that but I image identifying, re-installing packages, and fixing files/directories is going to be much more work.
Oh well. I think I've a spare SATA SSD around here so maybe I'll install on to that (with all that entails) and move to Trixie.
The trailing slash in the crontab error message appears to be a cosmetic mistake.
Not a transcription error. That's what came from crontab. It's curious it was missing the leading path elements too.
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sun Jan 04, 2026 12:39 am